20-Sided Polyhedron Lights Up Beautifully

Cubes and cylinders of course are fun, but for a more advances polyhedron, you might consider building a regular icosahedron. These 20-sided devices are perhaps best known as a die for gaming applications where a mere one to six isn’t sufficient, and if you’d like to make your own, creator “Random_Canadian” goes over how to model one of these faces in this project write-up. He then 3D-printed a “die” a bit bigger than a softball, along with a version large enough that it could be used as a lamp shade.

While not as physically impressive, the smaller one was in fact made more interesting with the addition or RGBW addressable LEDs inside connected to an Arduino. User interface is via a single button, which both turns the unit on and cycles through a green, red, blue, white, and rainbow pattern before shutting off again. This kind of shut control is made possible by a MOSFET that supplies power to the Arduino as required, and cuts it off when necessary.

A demo of the light-up gadget (with its larger cousin in the background) is seen in the first video below. The second shows an Arduino Nano, LEDs, and associated circuitry laid out on a breadboard, which should be informative if you’d like to try something similar. For that matter, one could imagine an icosahedron like this controlled by an accelerometer or any number of other tricks for an even more interactive geometry display!