Temperature Sensitive Snowflake by jpottaway

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

Since snowflakes are often seen as a pictograph for temperature so too is this one! Full R->G->B sweep from 15C-35C (60F-95F) and haptic mode control.
While its rotation and loop based rendering are certainly a standout feature I also I wanted to see how BlocksCAD went at building something functional that also included non-symmetric components. Was impressed with its ease of use and understanding.
Everything friction fits together. The board should snap onto the mounting lugs and the diffuser requires a little pressure to seat it into the base. For the diffuser white PLA works great, smoothing the LED light. The diffuser is very thin in parts (3 layers @ 0.2mm) to allow more passage of light in the snowflake pattern. Excuse the under extrusion on my diffuser ;) Support is only required for the internal battery compartment, easy to remove.
Inside is a battery or USB powered Adafruit Circuit Playground (code enclosed). There are many styles and sizes of lithium ion battery that can be used but the BlockCAD file has parameters for altering the battery size – another powerful feature. So long as the battery fits in the footprint of the overall design, which can also be set with parameters should you wish to enlarge the light projection area.
The default code has a few modes, starting with aforementioned temperature mode. Tapping the snowflake will take you through a few other pretty modes (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be5zCj8a_cM ) and finally to OFF. But all this is easily editable in the code, including the temperature range. Likewise, you could edit the diffuser pattern to be anything!
Part link:https://www.adafruit.com/product/3000