Outer Wilds hommage

*THE ICONS ARE HOMEMADE VECTOR ADAPTATIONS OF GRAPHICS CREATED BY MOBIUS DIGITAL, I DO NOT CLAIM OWNERSHIP OVER ANYTHING!*
So, this is not 3d nor 2d, nor sculpture or whatever, but I thought I would still share!
Yet another Christmas gift for my brother AND for my bf! (Christmas 2021).
I wish I had been able to make it all by myself but I was lacking time and material, so I had to come clear to my bf if I wanted to be able to finish everything before Christmas.

For this I used:
- 1 transparent plexiglass sheet (2mm)
- 1 milky plexiglass sheet (2mm)
- lots of black spray paint (and a tester of marine blue wall paint ^^)
- some MDF for the frame
- roughly 2 meters of WS2812B LEDs (I think 60 per meter, since that was ~100 LEDs in the end) and wiring
- a PSU (I think 4A)
- an off-brand Arduino Uno if I remember right (dunno anything about electronics, my bf is the one that knows :P)
- the Wokwi simulator to test my program
- Inkscape (the icons I used are taken from Outerwilds and I don't claim any right over them).

I used a laser cutter to engrave the drawing on the transparent plexiglass sheet, spray painted the milky one black then laser engraved it to remove the paint where I needed it; thinking back on it, I think It would have looked better with spraying the white part again with a thin layer of black so that the engraved drawing on top can be seen better.
I then also engraved the drawing on the inside of the frame so as to place the LEDs accordingly to what's was on top. I soldered them together (the only time I ever did that was in like 7th grade), and glued them to the frame. I made the surrounding box by laser cutting a MDF plate with some corners which would accommodate M5 nuts/bolts to fix the plexiglass sheets to the frame.
I drilled the plexiglass sheets only afterwards which was a big mistake (a nightmare to get everything aligned), but that's because I hadn't thought ahead about the frame.
I coded the behaviour using a FastLED library (had to dust off my python skills from 15years ago, with my bf helping me clean the code), so that the planets light up one after the other, and the sun progressively turn from yellow to red then white, with a final explosion that lights up the whole solar system. Then the Nomai mask turns blue, and the cycle resumes - obviously :)