Flashing Tesseract Ornament

The ornament described herein is a tesseract or 3-d representation of a 4-d object.

The ultimate in Geek ornamentation.

I was trying to achieve the look of the one pictured at this link, but was having difficulties with the tools and supplies I had.

Step 1 Tools, equipment, supplies and componants

For the Big outer box, I used an almost cube shaped baseball or trinket display case I bought at a craft supply store.

For the smaller box, I could not find something suitable, so I made one using he corners cut out of a clear rectangular box (cuboid) and clear glued back together.

Other thing the boxes and glue, I used:

One 9v battery clip,
one 110 ohm resistor,
one small on/off switch,
2 lengths of magnet (coil) wire,
3 LEDs (one was a self blinking type)
hot glue (and so a hot glue gun is appropriate also),
a soldering iron and some solder,
some conductive glue (although you can also run the magnet wire along edges and paint      a gold color to hide it)
A compass (no, not the kind that points north, the kind used to draw arcs and circles),
  OR a protractor,
The formula for figuring out the length of the "connecting legs"
and a LOT of patience.  Of course, if you have worked with hot glue before, you probably    
     already have some of that.

The formula is courtesy of BrittLiv and Kelseymh.   It depicts the square root of 3 divided by 2 * (b - a)

Or as explained by Kelseymh: 

  sqrt(3)
   -------     * (b - a)
     2

Comments

[kelseymh]

Nice project! Only one minor comment, which you may want to fix on the graphical version of Step 1: The formula is sqrt(3)/2 * (b - a). You've got a and b inside the radicals, which isn't right.

[Goodhart]

Did I correct it correctly ?

[kelseymh]

Yes, but it's really hard to read (lots of surrounding whitespace made the characters really small. You might just want to write it as

          sqrt(3)
          ------- (b - a)
             2

which is pretty standard mathematical notation.

[Goodhart]

Ok, added that to my notes, so it is written out, and as you have it displayed.

[Goodhart]

Thank you for that catch. I misread her formula.

[ChrysN]

Neat! Gotta love an ornament that requires a mathematical formula to make it.

[Goodhart]

Yes, an altimate geek ornament LOL

[Goodhart]

Now, if only I could watch the LED's move about as the people and objects did in  Cube² Hypercube. 

[ChrysN]

I saw Cube, but I didn't realize there was a sequel. I should check it out.

[Goodhart]

I didn't get to see Cube, but saw the sequal LOL I hated the very end of the sequel too.

[Dr. Pepper]

Amazing, love your project.

[Goodhart]

Thank you. I DO wish I could have made it LOOK a lot better though.

[lemonie]

Interesting, do you think you could scale-up to this?

L

[Goodhart]

I WAS thinking about adding sound to the thing, but I was running out of time as it was, and I wasn't sure exactly where to "hide" the speaker(s), seeing the box was mostly clear.  

It was hard enough concealing magnet wires to make the LED's appear to float (as you can see, I did not achieve the effect with the Red flasher).