180 LEDs light up this quilted musical icosahedron art piece. And it’s all controlled by Raspberry Pi.

How do you make a quilted art piece?

Maker Russell Eveleigh printed an icosahedron (a 20-faced shape) on heavy jersey fabric. The thick black lines help to stop light bleeding between different sections. A double-walled cardboard version of the icosahedron houses all the electronics behind the scenes.

Russell cut the LEDs into strips and soldered them together, then attached them to the cardboard frame with double-sided tape. The chain of LEDs starts in the centre of the shape and continues around the outside of the hexagon piece. Each section is lit with between three and seven lights.

Despite the build using three metres of LEDs, even at full brightness the lights draw less than six amps. So a single 10A power supply is able to run all the LEDs as well as the Raspberry Pi.

Light and sound routines

Each LED was programmed with red, green and blue values in CircuitPython. You can also set different routines to cycle through each colour in a certain order.

Tiny Adafruit speakers embedded in the cardboard frame provide the musical element of this project. Russell struggled with the music sequencing bit of the build, but managed to use Pygame, which he usually uses to write video games, as it has a very simple method to play sound files. It runs a simple sequence of lights matched to recordings of a keyboard playing notes.

Check out the maker’s other projects

You might remember Russell from his previous build. He made a Snapology sunrise lamp, which we covered in our recent Top project ideas for Raspberry Pi Zero blog.

And he also happens to have a cardboard planetarium in his garden:

Russell’s original project post on Medium is where we borrowed all of the pretty pictures in this blog. Head over to read all about this eyecatching project in more detail.