Shiney!

Construction




All together now... "OOooooo... shiney!"

As an added bonus...

LEDs relaxing in their natural habitat:

Little do they know of the terror that awaits them...

I've spent about 18 hours in the last week working on this and have used about 70 yards of aluminum tape to do this module. My fingers are a bit sore and dry, but at least it's done!

I've also briefly been playing around with a new method of attaching the acrylic to the wall. My latest idea is to use velcro along the pixel borders with the opposite velcro side on the contact paper/acrylic. The narrowest/longest velcro combination I could find was 5/8" wide, which is pretty wide compared to the 1/4" wide pixel divisions I have. I can cut 3 strips out of it and they work just about right.
At first, I just tried gluing the velcro to the wood, but that didn't work worth a damn. The glue soaked right through the wood and seeped through the velcro. Then I got the idea to put the aluminum tape on the top of the wood. (This testing was before I set out to cover the entire wall with tape) Gluing this way worked decently, but still not as good as I hoped. My most-recent incarnation involves glue for the most part, plus several staples along the length of the piece to really hold it in place.
To offset the gap created by the velcro (I don't really need velcro across every single division, and the edges are 1/8", which is far too narrow for the velcro), I also bought a bunch of black felt to glue on both the pixel divisions and the contact paper/acrylic. Hopefully, the combination of the velcro and the felt will create a light-blocking barrier on the top of the wall.

You can see the velcro (and felt) in the pictures. It's the black strips along the different parts, on the top.

I have also left 7 (should be 8, but I got a little ahead of myself) pixels untaped, as these are the potential locations of the distance sensors. I've still not tested them at all, so they may not happen, but I would really like to use them.