Electronics, Light, and Teenage Imagination
Ceiling Stars was a creative electronics project I built when I was about 17 or 18. I had just moved into a different room in the house and wanted to make it unique—something artistic, something mine.
The project involved wiring up about 50 tiny LEDs—super small, like 1mm in size—each individually soldered and suspended from the ceiling with ultra-thin wire. Some lights dangled just a half inch down, while others dropped 3 or 4 inches to create a staggered 3D star effect across the ceiling.
Because I only had white LEDs at the time, I compensated by wiring them to a variable resistor so I could control the brightness. When they lit up, it gave the illusion of stars hanging in space.
But I didn't stop there. I also painted a starfield directly on the ceiling using glow-in-the-dark paint. After charging the paint with a bright light for a few minutes, I'd turn off the room lights, flick on the LED stars, and be immersed in a personal cosmos overhead.
All the wiring was hidden and routed to a control switch next to the room's light switch. It was more than decoration—it was functional, interactive, and pure teenage imagination brought to life with soldering, wire, and light.
