Lightboxes

Its the holiday season and we’ve been trying to figure out what to give some of friends as gifts. Also we recently picked up a Cricut and have been looking for different crafty projects we can take on to make use of the new tool. Why not tackle two birds with one stone and use the Cricut to make their gifts.

While working through what we could possible make with the vinyl cutter, I remembered of a souvenir I picked up from a model store that was “Paper Theater”.

Fast forward to some searching for templates online and a quick trip to the local craft store for some thicker paper and we’re off to the races.

Making the lightbox itself

For the most part, picked up a template from a random site and then fiddled around settings and different paper thicknesses to successfully cut out the templates on our Cricut.

Ultimately we settled on using a “light” cut mat with the standard fine point blade to do the cutting. For the materials, we used 65lbs white paper and the deepest 8in x 10in shadow box we could find as the frame.

When assembling the layers we used 2mm foam board to stack the layers and add some depth to the lightbox.

LED strip, the hard way

One of the key features of a light box is of course to light it from behind the cutouts that you make to give it all a nicer depth. This is usually achieved with an off the shelf led strip that has an IR controller and is battery powered. While that would work well enough and would quickly and neatly wrap up this project for me, I thought that it would be cool if I was able to make custom light patterns for the different light boxes that better match the display itself. This would mean rolling my own code and using individually addressable RGB LEDs to illuminate the back of the paper stack.

High Level Circuit

For individually addressable LED light strip I opted for the reliable and easy to find WS2812B and picked up a light strip from Amazon. To drive the LED strip I really only needed a single pin so using a whole Arduino to just toggle an individual pin seemed like a waste. Also knowing that I would probably want to have this powered off of a battery pack, I wanted to minimize the power draw of any microcontroller that I end up using. Poking around different small form-factor microcontrollers, the ATTiny85 seemed to check all of the boxes to control the light strip.

ATTINY + Neopixels

The ATTiny85 microcontroller comes in a basic 8pin DIP package. Unlike your typical Arduino, these micro’s don’t come with a USB port or serial converter to upload programs. Instead, an AVR programmer or an Arduino as an ISP is used to upload programs by wiring specific pins to power on and configure the controller.

To program the ATTiny85, I used the Arduino IDE and installed the Attiny family of boards using the board manager.

Arduino	ATTiny85
Pin 13	Pin 2
Pin 12	Pin 1
Pin 11	Pin 0
Pin 10	Reset
5V	VCC
GND	GND