A while back I came across this cool LED Controller called PixelBlaze. It packages together WiFi access and LED Controller interface in one handy package. As I am not a big electronics whiz, the idea of only dealing with 3 soldar connections appealed to me. I also had a few 8 by 8 LED panels laying around, so I decided to play with some builds.

The first one I came up with was a set of towers made of short pieces of half inch square acrylic rod. These are lit from below with an 8 by 9 LED matrix.

The fact that each block covers 4 LEDs gives the towers a sort of pastel look which I really quite like.

The whole piece is contained in a cube lined with one-way mirror, giving it an infinity effect. It’s pretty cool in person but difficult to photograph.

This video will give you a better idea of how it looks.

Project #2 was a second cube, this one enclosed but with a front panel that would allow me to swap different screens out for display.

Each screen starts with a layer of white acrylic for diffusion. The next layer is a thin piece of clear acrylic, coated with black spray paint and then engraved with the laser. Oddly, the non-engraved side presents a clearer version of the image. The final layer is the one way mirror acrylic I mentioned previously. In this case, it’s there less as a reflective surface, but more to provide contrast between the lit and unlit parts of the screen.

Here’s another video for a better idea of the looks.

The PixelBlaze platform is a ton of fun to play with and I highly recommend it.