Hol-oh-no

I stuck pictures up of my first production prototype and so far all the responses have been for a fully-assembled and wired Holocron.

This isn't what I got into the project for.

I wanted to make available a kit; a kit that had better aesthetics than the one kit I knew of, that assembled easier (not hard!) and that was if possible cheaper. The majority of work I've done on the mechanical design has been in aid of making it easier for other people to assemble one (if it was just me, I'd build a jig and slap glue over the pieces and there it would be).

Probably thing to do is to finish up the samples of the alternate designs and see if I can entice more people into getting the kit instead. Or deal; assembly is really not that onerous (after all, I did do all that work to make it easy!) and figure out how I'd have to price them to be worth it to me.




Oh, but the lighting circuit just isn't working. And there's worse. I just did an experiment. Faked up a box of translucent white 1/16" acrylic and stuck a 3W Cree in there. And it looks wonderful. I'm willing to deal with a dark spot on the bottom -- the holocron opens up there anyhow so the illusion suffers already at that angle -- so I can probably make this work with a circuit board lying on the bottom of a diffusor cube.

The cube shape is just barely glimpsed, but gives an incredible sense of depth and complexity..and almost tesseract-like effect, which can only be enhanced by detailing the cube with some black acrylic or vinyl decals.

The alternatives I have aren't wonderful. Assuming I can't come up with a simpler way to cover at least the 180 hemisphere, either through-hole Neopixels that can be bent outwards, or make my own mini circuit boards with right-angle headers.




Well, okay. I need to fix some issues with the files, laser off enough pieces to fix the magnet problem on the first production proto and complete the Imperial, Temple, and perhaps a second Stolen (mostly because I already cut most of the shell parts for one already). But I might not get to the laser this weekend; I also have to problem-solve this new idea of an inner cube, and how it gets attached.