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Snowflake Power Converter

Posted on 2018-01-112019-11-18 by Lucky Resistor

I designed a very simple power converter for the snow flake decoration. The snow flake boards require 3.3V, a voltage which is not commonly available in a household. Therefore the power converter takes 5V USB power and convert it into the required 3.3V.

There is no fancy circuit inside of this box, lazily I simple used a Traco Power TSR2-2433 DC/DC power converter. It is a single component containing everything required. No external components like capacitors or resistors needed.

lucky-resistor-5

All other components you can see in the photo, I just added to make it more interesting. It is a simple circuit with a photo transistor and MOSFET which turns on the LED in darkness.

The functional aspect of this power converter is minimal. Like the snow flake decoration, it is more a piece of art than anything else.

Case Design

I used this simple board to do another test of the link between Autodesk Eagle and Autodesk Fusion360. For very simple projects like this, it already worked ok – still there is room for improvements. I used the board from Eagle as base, exporting it into Fusion360. There I created the case around the board as shown in the next image.

Power Converter Case v6.png

The idea was to create a laser cut case from 4mm transparent acrylic glass which is fastened by the spacer which also hold the board.

lucky-resistor-4

After this design process, I copied the outlines of all required elements into a own sketch in Fusion360 and arranged them there in an efficient way to the laser cutter. From there I exported all lines into a DXF file.

The engravings I created using Adobe Illustrator. In this program I could optimise the typography and lines for the laser cutter. Again I exported this elements as DXF.

lucky-resistor-2

All the DXF files were imported into the software for the laser cutter and combined. I just manually added the engravings to the sides. There was anyway no simpler method, because I had to adjust the parameter for cutting and engraving and mark the different elements for the job.

laser-cutter

This software also automatically optimises the paths and order for the job, inner elements are cut before outer elements.

Glowing in the Dark

After cutting the elements, I used an acrylic paint base and mixed it with luminescent pigments. I filled the engravings with this paint and removed all excess paint from the flat surface.

lucky-resistor-3

Using this technique, the engravings glow in the dark, which is a very nice effect. On the daylight, the paint does not look different from a regular engraving. It has the same surface and colour.

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This case and power converter are completely over-designed, but it gives the project a nice finish. It was an interesting practice to test some features of Fusion360 and Eagle.

lucky-resistor-7

The snowflake project was a pleasant art project I enjoyed really much. With the help of a number of Boldport Club members, I could keep the costs for the boards relatively low by creating a number of kits, which increased the batch size. While there are no kits available for the public, all files are open-sourced and available on GitHub. The repository contains Gerber files for the boards, a bill of materials and a full-featured firmware. So everybody can create his own snowflake decoration.

If you have questions, miss some information or just have any feedback, feel free to add a comment below.

Have fun!

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3 thoughts on “Snowflake Power Converter”

  1. ahollis says:
    2018-09-17 at 12:08

    That is friggin awesome.

    Reply
  2. druck says:
    2019-12-18 at 11:01

    Would a Raspberry Pi be able to supply enough current to power the stars from it’s 3.3V line? If so, maybe it would be possible to drive the data line from a GPIO pin, allowing the Pi to control the patterns?

    Reply
    1. Lucky Resistor says:
      2019-12-18 at 11:11

      The Pimoroni snowflakes require 5V power, and 5 will sum up to 350mA, which is probably too much to route over a Rapberry-Pi. On the other hand, the data line has 3.3V logic level, just controlling the snowflake boards should be possible from a GPIO pin. If you power the snowflake boards and the raspberry Pi from the same power supply, you just can connect the GPIO with the data-in and GND with GND of the boards.

      Reply

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