I saw this post on Reddit about a UFO lamp/night light:
https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/g4x2tg/ufo_led_test_success/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2xI want to do something similar and was talking to my Wife about it. She mentioned the "Wishing tree" in "True and the Rainbow Kingdom" (Netflix) which my 3 year old daughter is into. I thought that was a great idea. My plan is to have a semi-transparent shell of green PLA for the leaves and set a NeoPixel stick or similar to light up the inside of it and make it glow.
The question is what to do about the wishes? As you can see from the attached pictures the wishes live in the tree and are little yellow balls. So I need a way to light up a small/specific section of the shell and make that yellow. The shell will probably end up being a bit smaller than a basketball. My printer has a 200cm3 print volume so when I print the "leaves" it has to fit inside that. I'm thinking that if there were something like 20ish yellow spots throughout, that this would be sufficient.
My first thought for how to light it was to put a NeoPixel strip "laying flat" in the bottom of it pointing up and have that illuminate the interior of the tree. But doing that there is no way to have specific narrow regions of color.
Could I do some kind of fiber-optic bundle with a yellow LED on it and then rout the fibers to various places on the shell for the pinpoint yellow lights? The only other thing I can think of is if I had some kind of individually addressable LED "blanket/grid" with pretty narrow spacing. Then I could make all the lights green with the exception of the ones I want to be the wishes.
I'm just gathering ideas at this point and don't know what I don't know. So please feel free to suggest other solutions if you have any ideas. Thank you!