March-April 2022

The theme of Kostume Kult’s annual Hornball Party was Lightbringer, so think spooky hell demons.

This obviously meant I had to create a 8ft diameter pentagram that would hang from the ceiling.

My friend Nina Van styrum collaborated on a design which you can see here below.

The center is the Kostume Kult logo with some added demonic horns. The outside ring is lined with text in “Enochian” the ancient language of the angels. I used a random Enochian text generator to make the sentence. The translation is: Smile when you say nasty words. Horn.

Design of the pentagram in Fusion 360

Once the design was complete it was off to the Fat Cat Fab Lab to laser cut the design out of wood.

The piece was constructed by placing two laser cut panels against each other with wood bars screwed between them. This made the structure rigid while also providing a place to mount the LEDs and create an air gap before the diffusing material.

Polyethylene foam sheets and photography diffusing film sheets were used to diffuse the LEDs. For the pentagram star itself, pool noodles with LED strips stuck inside were used.

Disregard the mess in this photo

From the back, you can see node style wired LEDs were used and mounted by pressing the LEDs into laser cut holes in the wood. The LEDs were all 12V powered by some mean well supplies that just sort of sat onto. An Advatek Pixlite controller was used to drive them. The patterns were controlled by a laptop running LXstudio. I planned on fully mapping all the LEDs in 3D space but didn’t have time so I roughly mapped them as circles in 3D space. It worked out fine.

The entire thing was then suspended from the ceiling with paracord. It sat directly above the dance floor and was pretty groovy.

The pentagram (at least the ring part of it) now lives on the ceiling of the Fat Cat Fab Lab.