I wanted to get an idea of how much room I had to work with inside the stars. Using the pattern from mathworld I made a small stellated dodecahedron with the “unit pentagrammic edge length” roughly 0.7″ which was what would fit on a sheet of paper. According to maths this makes the star diameter ~3.5″. This is what it looks like with the top open.
I need to be able to mount each LED on a small circuit board (0.6″ square) and then mount that onto a heat sink. The design for the heat sink is pretty simple though the name for the particular solid is a mouthful. It is a Small Rhombicuboctahedron. Well, it’s not exactly one of those but it’s close enough. I cut one of those out of an index card and taped it together too. Here it is next to the star.
The 3.5″ star has a dodecahedron open in the center which has an indiameter of 1.5″. The simulation heat sink is a little more than 1″ diameter. This star is smaller than the minimum size I’m actually thinking about for the lights. The smaller light will probably be 5″ diameter (2.25″ center opening) and the larger 6.5″ (3″ center opening). Ultimately this means that the LED block will fit comfortably inside. Yay maths.
It fits!
om nom nom