X

I was tired of regular squares. Up to this point I had been building 3D objects with internal subdivisions and putting the texture on the outside. This time I kept the front face perfectly flat and changed the light coming from behind it instead. It was also the first time I really let a 3D printer and an LED matrix become one object, rather than a print sitting on top of some pixels.

Behind the panel, the grid breaks into 10 mm cells, and each one holds a simple X. For the shapes to read without bleeding into each other, the print had to be exact. I held the white diffusion layer to one millimeter across the entire surface, then printed a one-millimeter black mask directly onto the back of it. The mask is where the shapes actually live. From the front, until it powers on, there is nothing to see.