Back to Basics on the Bantam, with Sophy Wong

There has been a foray of LED / pixel projects lately, in the form of the platonic solids. We've seen "full size" LED cubes, pico-pixel LED cubes, and even a LED icosahedron (the last two being from ol' Greg Davill, of course).

All of those builds, however, are hugely dense in terms of pixel packing and placement. Even for those of us who could manually assemble such boards, current global situations like the ever pressing COVID-19 can make things like getting hold of etched PCBs in the first place somewhat difficult!

So, it is with a keen eye that we take a look at the LED Dodecahedron from Sophy Wong, which takes a step back from those dense pixel arrays, and instead offers a build that could be truly built from stock by most any of us!

Wong has made waves recently with her absolutely exquisite, couture 3D-printed plate armor cosplay works. She's turned out some incredible costume work that showcases her resource and talent when it comes to realization of design.

Red Sonja and Queen Gedren

Her latest cosplay project is a take on the mighty Queen Gedren character from the 1985 film Red Sonja.

Gedren is a nasty piece of work, and can be observed in the film adorned and embellished with gold filigree and a mysterious green orb, seen below.

While Wong has proven her incredible costume-making skills already with the base of the costume, shown below, we're here to take a bit of a closer look at that mysterious green orb: the Talisman.

The Talisman

In the film Red Sonja, the Talisman is a mysterious relic — to which the creation of the world and all the living things within it is attributed.

That's a powerful doodad, and sounds like it has quite the requirement for battery life! Thankfully, the "relic" that Wong has crafted in place of the real thing has somewhat comparatively relaxed power requirements!

Formed of 12, equal sized, pentagonal sided faces, this LED dodecahedron — one of the platonic solids — leaves us with only two remaining options for regular, convex LED polyhedron — the LED tetrahedron, and LED octahedron. Who's going to step up to those builds?

With five vertices to a face, there is a nice unity equivalence to the LED count, with a single WS2812b being placed at each corner of each face, for a total of five per board, or, 60 LED per "Talisman."

That's not a huge amount of power, some 18W at full output, and favors nicely against the 4x10^69 Joules released in the Big Bang — the event to which the creation of the world and all the living things within it can be attributed.

It's certainly more battery friendly for those extended comic cons and cosplay outings at least!

Milling Around...

Wong is one of the lucky people who have a Bantam Tools mill in her tooling arsenal. We've seen these popping up quite a lot recently, with a recent appearance in Jiří Praus' BrassBoy, and showing up in supporting creations from Mohit Bhoite.

These mills produce strikingly crisp tool paths, and are more than capable of handling the trace widths found in the design Wong has come up with.

The LED panels are a five-pixel string of WS2812b, wrapped around the face of the pentagonal board. The pin-out of the WS2812b lends itself nicely to being laid out in sequence, and as such, Wong is able to get away with only a single link wire on these single-sided boards. Nice!

There's even space for some artistic relief, with the center of the boards providing enough unbroken copper to include some nice milled graphic elements.

The jumble of wires above is a snapshot of progress on the way towards the finished relic, with the assembled dodecahedron shown below — lit in the appropriate hue of green.

With this level of gold and "glam" to Gedrens character, the stark, clean lines of the LED dodecahedron need a "little" help to look the part, ready for screen time.

Well, we already know how much of a dab hand Wong is at crafting and 3D printing — just look at the rest of the body of the Talisman as it's coming along. This could easily pass for the real thing, and I can't wait to see the entire costume come together — paying true homage to the film.

While Red Sonja maybe didn't have the best box office reception, this cosplay from Wong looks set to be a real smash!

Follow Wong on Instagram and Twitter, or check out her website.