Spotify Glass Art

My cash strapped college student wanted to give one of these Spotify Glass Art lights to her boyfriend for Christmas. I told her that we could make one in my High School's fab lab and the only cost would be for a piece of acrylic and a small LED strip - both of which are available on Amazon.

What you need for materials:

6" x 9" piece of acrylic (I used ¼" thick but thinner would work too)

6" piece of 2 x 4

6" LED strip

What you need access to:

Smart Phone with PicsArt

Spotify

Corel Draw (Adobe Illustrator or other photo editing program)

Laser Engraver

Table Saw with Dado Stack

We are going to turn the photo into vectors which will make everything much more abstract.

Download the free app PicsArt (Apple) / PicsArt (Google). While there is a free web-based version, the app let my students work on this part outside of class.

For this step, get something to drink, put your feet up, and channel your inner child as you color and try to stay within the lines. I started by making the background entirely black. Then I moved on to making my son's jersey completely white. This is all done on PicsArt. Using the draw option, sample a color and fill in, slowly and carefully. Decide if you want to keep faces. I like them more abstract - without faces.

Pick a song and call it up on Spotify. Screenshot both the title with play controls and the Spotify code.

I have looked for web / Chromebook friendly programs but so far, none of them are as easy to use as Corel Draw. In Corel Draw, you can right click your photo and choose outline trace. From here, you can vectorize the picture. I suggest switching the view to wireframe and to take a look without doing any editing. My song title and controls looked great but had a box around them. I was able to choose and delete the box and it was good to go.

I find that our Epilog Helix makes nice clean lines if I add a hairline around the all the objects. In Corel Draw, this is done by selecting all and adding a hairline from the top toolbar.

I always run it once on cardboard to make sure I'm happy with what the results look like. I did a test run at 8x12 and thought it was too big. Did a second run at 6x9 and am happier with the size. (I forgot to ratchet the power down on the 8x12 - you can see that a small fire burned out the 'Demons' logo on my son's jersey).

I also didn't like how square my daughter's hair looked at her shoulder. I went back into Corel Draw and rounded it out.

In my intro to woods class, our first assignment is to learn how to square a board. To make the assignment a little more fun, and to teach why measuring accurately is important, we make Giant Jenga blocks with scrap 2x4's. (I created an Instructable for these if you are interested). By the end of the first two weeks, I have a decent sized pile of 1 3/8 by 2 3/8 by 7 1/8 blocks lying around and snagged one for this project.

You will need to cut a dado ½" wide by ¾" deep. I put the dado stack into my table saw and ran the dado. This is a good time to stain, paint or poly the base.

I found fairy lights on Amazon for quite a bit less than led strips so I wrapped the fairy lights around the base of the acrylic to get it to the right width. Then I put a bead of super glue along the bottom edge and bottom back of the acrylic and snugged it up against the back corner of the dado. Lastly, I tucked the lights in the remaining space. I didn't anchor them in any way - they stay put just fine on their own.

Turn on the fairy lights, dim the overhead lights and admire your work!