Abe’s Grand Tetons Wall
Impending arrival of my firstborn inspired me to make a cool feature wall/night light for his nursery - critical for a newborn’s development!
The design concept was “Northern Lights behind the Grand Tetons” (which you might note is not a naturally occurring phenomenon as far south as Wyoming!) I had a couple of 4x8 sheets of 1/2” MDF, a CNC router, some WS2812b LED pixel tape and one free weekend, so the design was constrained accordingly.
Sleeping baby! The pixel tape runs a color/intensity slow, random wave through purple/blue/green - I created the show in LightJams and recorded it to an SD card on the pixel controller. Took some tweaking to get the total output low enough to not disturb the sleeping Abraham.
After painting the sky, stars, and Milky Way stripe on the wall and painting the mountains separately, it was finally time to put the whole thing together.
Painting the wall.
The mountain was composed of three separate sections with a strip offset a couple of inches from the top edge for the LED pixel tape to rest on. The snowy patches were 1/2" larger than the holes they showed through, so I painted them and then glued them on with construction adhesive.
This is the second sheet of 4x8 MDF after routing on the CNC. I nested the parts in Illustrator, exported a DXF, then created tool paths with bridges between parts in VisualCAM.
This was the initial mockup done in Photoshop and Illustrator. I simplified the mountain silhouette a little in Illustrator after this, but otherwise the final toolpaths were created directly from the mockup.