This was a fun personal project that I started to work on my woodworking skills. I have been trying to increase the wall decoration at my place so this seemed like a great opportunity.
The scene in this piece is based on pictures that I took at Grand Tetons NP. The central peak is Grand Teton rising high above the rest of the horizon. In the foreground is T.A. Moulton Barn, a famous landmark next to the park. The barn does a great job of breaking up the foreground and adding depth to the piece.
I used a jigsaw to cut out all of the details in the piece. Then I chiseled out a groove in the back for light strips. After sanding everything down with multiple grits, I stained the pieces with multiple colors to break up the different sections. The mountains and barn pieces have multiple color sections made using painters tape to mask the piece.
To complete the piece I made a simple frame for the mountains to sit in. To add a little flair, I stylized two of the corners with lighter colored stains to stick out.
At the end, each part got multiple coats of polyurethane top coat to complete the piece.
I used an ESP32 board to control my lights for this project. There are 3 light strips for this project, one for the mountains, one for the foreground, and one for the moon. I had some issues with the initial setup because I found that the board only had 2 RMT Tx channels for light strips. So instead of having 3 light strips, I needed to combine 2 of them and separate them in software.
I chose a board with Wi-Fi capability so that I could control the lights using my phone. I set up a simple webpage to connect to the board and then wrote some different functions to control the lights in different ways.
For the moon and the mountain backdrop I used Perlin noise to make the lights have a smooth movement. The back lights are kept to shades of blue to mimic the northern lights sitting over the mountains. The slow movement of the lights moving over the mountains is soothing to watch.
