Laser-Cut Panels Make This Sound-Reactive Star Come to Life

Light is a funny thing. It gets all weird and bendy, which can result in some pretty unintuitive effects. Combine that with the way that our minds perceive light and you can create fun illusions. Erin St Blaine turned that to her advantage to design this Star Illusion that you can build yourself.

This illusion here is one of movement, even though nothing in the assembly actually moves at all. Instead, it flashes lights in changing colors across a stack of edge-lit laser-cut acrylic panels. Star shapes are cut into those panels, but each is slightly offset (both in size and rotation) relative to the one before. With the right LED effects, the visual result is one of a star kind of shrinking and twirling in a hologram sort of way.

To build this, you will obviously need a laser cutter. Or, potentially, a CNC mill. You will use that to cut both the transparent acrylic panels and the sections of the wood enclosure.

Then, to bring it to life, you will need an Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion, which is an ESP32-based development board built specifically for driving LEDs. That will run WLED firmware, which has a handy web interface for configuring the LEDs and changing effects. The LEDs themselves are on a classic Adafruit Neopixel strip.

The wiring is very easy and only requires soldering three wires. To assemble everything, you simply stack the acrylic panels, glue the LED strip in place, and put it all in the wood box you cut.

This would make great holiday décor, but would also look awesome the rest of the year.