I built the Merkabar light back in 2015. Exact motivations are lost in time. I was experimenting with 3D-printed connectors and LED strips on U-channel aluminium strips. The plan was to build a series of larger ones as festival decor.

As a prototype for a system of festival lights, each strip has a male and female JST connector. I used thick wire to reduce voltage drop.

It got used at a Tortuga group show, which I used as the motivation for the build and then at a couple of weddings before it got packed away when we moved to Melbourne.

I've had a couple of goes at re-building it since moving back to Sydney and recently found some time to properly re-build it. Between figuring out the data path in three dimensions and fixing the broken bits of strip it took a while.

The connectors are a bit of an Achilles heel; they are a bit fragile, and when reassembling, the pads ripped off the strip a couple of times and needed some more involved fixes, jumping power and ground further up the strip and soldering data straight to the LED pins.

The original build uses a first generation Particle Spark Core. I put together a little adapter to convert a three-pin JST connector from ESP-32 WLED board I had built for Burning Man to the Spark Core pinout and now it's running WLED which looks great.

Photos from both the original build and the recent rebuild.