It always amazes me what a group of incentivised  people can accomplish in a day. Back home in Scandinavia, we had to either do our own gardening, or live with whatever mess we decided to leave untended in the yard. Here, it’s actually quite feasible to have a gardening company come in and establish a garden in a day.

Granted, it’s not a huge garden, but considering the lake of mud that they had to contend with when they started, I think they did a pretty good job. They even trucked in some fully grown palm trees and a bunch of big rocks.

We love seeing greenery, and it does calm the senses. A nice garden surrounding a house is like a frame for a painting, I figure. We just couldn’t stop at the house, and not do something with the yard. Unfortunately, we also had to cancel some vacation plans to pay for it all, but hey, you can’t have everything…

Now, we really have to do something about the koi pond. The pump area is not watertight yet, and last time we tested the filtering system it overflowed…

We finished installing the star ceiling the other day. It turned out that in a dark room, all those stars generated more light than we had intended, so we decided to install only about a fifth the number of stars originally planned. In addition, the ceiling is quite low and a larger number of stars would probably have looked much better with a higher ceiling. This is what part of the star ceiling looks like now; as you can see, some of the stars are blue, which we felt gives a little more variation to the overall effect:

After installing all the fiber optics, we simply painted matte black paint over the protruding fibers. This is what it looked like after the first of two coats of paint, and before we cut the fibers a few millimeters from the ceiling:

To ease maintenance, we mounted the entire ceiling panel using so-called piano hinges on one side, and horizontal bolts in the opposite corners. These bolts will later be painted black and will hopefully be much less visible than they are now.

The top side of the ceiling panel is quite a bit messier than the bottom side. We used a staple gun to staple the fibers (loosely) in place

This afternoon I popped over to The Asia House and helped the carpenters build the star ceiling. I brought an LCD projector, hooked it up to my laptop, and projected the image I had prepared earlier onto the ceiling panel, which we had temporarily leaned against a far wall. We then drew with a pencil in every star and planet onto the ceiling, marking down which ones were large and small, and which ones might look good in blue versus white.

Next, we drilled holes for every star. It turned out that a 1mm drill bit was just right for both the smaller 0.75mm optical fiber and the larger 1mm fiber. I had originally planned to use multiple fibers for the larger stars, but I realized quickly that due to the limited size of the LED controller, we would not be able to fit in all the stars. So we’re going with only a single fiber per star, and we’ll use the slightly larger fiber for the larger stars. Considering the low height of the ceiling (since the floor is raised at the seating area), smaller stars will probably also look a lot more realistic.

After drilling the holes, we mounted the LED controller to the frame at the rear, at a location near the center. We then proceeded to insert the optical fibers, one per hole, and routing them to the controller with a little slack to spare. We used a staple gun to keep the fibers close to the frame, although we had to be careful not to let the staples press down on the fibers or they would break. A dab of glue holds each fiber in place in its hole.

The guy in the store where I bought the LED controller said that hot melt glue works best for mounting the fibers, since it dries quickly. However, we couldn’t get it to work as the fibers kept melting under the heat. Instead we used good old Elmer’s glue, which unfortunately needed a long time to dry so it did get a little messy.

At the LED controller, we bunched up as many optical fibers as would fit in one of the five LED tubes, wrapped each bundle tightly in scotch tape, and inserted it into its tube. Again it got a little messy; with fibers sticking around everywhere it was hard to get them bunched up evenly. Due to the number of fibers I wanted to squeeze in, we removed the cable entry ring and replaced it with some masking tape instead.

On the front side, we cut the optical fibers off with a cutter. We left about an inch of each fiber protruding from the ceiling.

Next, the guys will be covering the ceiling with a couple of coats of a matte black paint, painting right over the fibers. Once the paint has dried, they will cut each fiber off close to the ceiling, giving us a good, clean dot of light emanating at each star location.

Since we are making a star ceiling in the home theater anyway, I thought that we might as well choose a particular sky. I wasn’t comfortable with just picking random locations for the simulated "stars"; I wanted the result to be as personal and realistic as possible, and with the online tools available these days, I knew that it wouldn’t be difficult.

First we picked a location and a time of particularly historical significance to our family. Then I went to an interesting website maintained by John Walker. There he has a pretty good interactive planetarium where you can produce sky maps for any location, date and time. I used Google Earth to find the exact latitude and longitude of the location for the event, and then I entered the latitude, longitude, date and time in "Your Sky".

With a little cutting-and-pasting, and with a little massaging using an image viewer/editor I use called Faststone, I got the image that I wanted. All I have to do now is get it from laptop to ceiling…

I finally got around to buying the LED controller that I "need" for the star ceiling I am planning to build in the home theater downstairs. I say "need" because who really needs a star ceiling?  It’s just an interesting thing to do, and I figured why not, we’ll hopefully learn something…

It’s a really simple LED controller from Neo-Neon. It’s got some custom circuitry, a 9VDC supply and 5 LED’s mounted within shrinkable tubes. I had the distributor swap out the LED’s such that the controller now has 4 white LED’s and 1 blue LED. The controller is really easy to connect: bunch the fibers into bundles, wrap them with tape and insert the bundles into the tubes.

I bought over 300m of multi-string fiber-optics, which should be more than enough to provide a realistic-looking ceiling in the 2×2m panel above the seating area in the home theater. The fibers are a mix of 0.75mm and 1.00mm diameter fibers, so I can vary the sizes and colors of the "stars". The controller cycles slowly through blue and white, in a pattern that supposedly should look somewhat realistic (or at least artistic). Later this week we’ll be marking and drilling up the plywood ceiling, then we’ll mount the fibers and the electronics, and paint it. The plan is to obtain an effect similar to the one below; let’s see how we do later this week!