Pyramid

A pixel effect crawling across the surface of a solid object. That was the picture. The first thing I built to get it was a glowing pyramid with a subdivided grid inside.

Getting crisp isolation without light bleed meant printing the sculpture as a single piece. Every layer needed a black core to block light between shafts, white walls to bounce it up, and a frosted shell for diffusion. The printer did three filament swaps per layer, leaving a mountain of purge waste. I put a 256-pixel matrix inside and turned it on. Heat built up fast. I picked the piece up after a burn-in test and accidentally mushed the softened grid in with my thumb.

Venting the back helped, but potting holes in the front would ruin the look. I swapped to 12-volt matrices, kept the diodes a centimeter off the surface, and set a 1-amp current limit in the software. The piece hung at Glow Lounge in Denver and ran for months without warping. Every sealed piece since has been printed the same way, as a single body.