
The Dance of Freedom took me over 50 hours of work to complete after spending many hours at home perfecting the design in Corel from my first attempt of this majestic whale back in 2016.
All work was completed at MADE in STL – a makerspace in St Louis. MADE is great because they have a low monthly membership and then you rent the areas or tools you need. For this project, I rented a laser cutter from 10am Thurs – 7pm Sunday, the woodshop for an hour to plane & cut boards for the stand, and the paint room for 4 hours on Friday.
Costs for the project were rental time from MADE was $215, acrylic $150, 2 boards & leds & 10a power supply $125, paint $30 (colors I didn’t have in my arsenal), 4 nights lodging and food $675, fuel ($63) for 465 miles and over 55 hours of my time.
The led library I’m using is FastLED which I then created 4 separate objects to alter in my control loop: water, wake left, wake right and whale.













Here is where I cried. As I was putting on the stand, I forgot to pull out USB cord for programming the Mega Pro and some side pressure on the cord caused the USB-mini port to brake off, rendering my device disabled.
Sadly I didn’t notice it had happened until the work was complete and I turned it on. It came on momentarily but then locked up. It took 2 more hours to remove the stand, remove two plates, remove and solder in a new Arduino board and reassemble the piece.
It is finished!