In addition to building bird feeder replica of the Harbor Town Lighthouse on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, I also modeled and made this into a bird house with working lighthouse light. Please note that the only thing made on the Glowforge was the acrylic cupola windows and balcony windows. I was able to use black LED acrylic to get a pretty cool effect. The lights are a WS2812B LED strip controlled by an IoTorero WLED controller in segments using the built in lighthouse preset. The different color sections of the lighthouse are designed to come apart, but also if you wanted more than 1 bird, and have multiple segments with bird access hole. The WLED controller lives in the bottom section with a wire chase up through the walls to the tower.
Cool project. If you’re looking to get really nerdy, it looks like that lighthouse has 6 hot spots on its 4th order fresnel lens and flashes white every 2.5 seconds, for a total rotation time of 15 seconds.
Also, subpixel animation would look really good here, and get beyond the digital “step” feel of the light scroll. Essentially you fade the lead and trailing lights in and out, making smoother transitions.
Very fun. I think I can get the lights to simulate what you see in the video with segments in WLED software. I didn’t spend a ton of time messing with it yet.
You could always sell these designs (if you aren’t already). Replicas of various tourist spots like the Portland Head Light. They would have to be old enough (like most of the light houses should be) that they are public domain, of course. (Just don’t use the actual real name in the description…)
Right – If it was built prior to 1990, there’s no copyright consideration. As long as you make it clear that you are in no way related to the owning/managing organization (their gift shop, for example), there’s no problem using the actual name, either.
