Here she is (embedded link to video). I’ve got half of the rocket built, as you can see from the photo, the bottom half of the rocket is enough to get the main idea across. I can build the  rest of the rocket between Part 1 and Part 2 and up till the expo if need be. The building of the Lego itself wasn’t too bad, it’s pretty par for the course here and I just followed the directions to build the model. I really wanted to base my idea around the lights and aesthetic and ambiance of having the “smoke” plume once the lights are in. It’s definitely an LED, night light vibe type aesthetic that I was really shooting for and the rocket was just model to spice it up and add some flair.

The 3D print itself went well enough, after the second iteration the stand came out fine. The 5 cutout slots in the top were malformed upon further inspection though. These cutouts were intended for the Lego rocket nozzles to slot into for a little additional stability but it turns out that I misjudged some of the tolerances and the walls and bottoms of the circular cut outs were a bit too thin. As a result they were warped and shrunk after cooling, which meant that the Lego nozzle pieces don’t fit into the slots. As a result I had to just set the rocket on top of the stand. The result of this is that I’m going to have to improve my original way to secure the rocket to ensure that it doesn’t fall off. I think that a couple dowels will be the move here, tied on with fishing line. This is because I want the rocket to be able to be removable from the stand for easy transportation.

Here you can see the lights wrapped around the stand itself. The lights are able to change color and I was able to get them to react to the audio of the actual Saturn V launch but the functionality of that is limited. Basically what I did was download the audio of the Saturn V’s launch. I then uploaded that to my phone. From there, the app that’s associated with the LED light strip can find the music on my phone and changes the lights based on the audio information. It works decently well but I do think that there’s room for improvement. I’m entertaining the idea of swapping out the lights with programmable ones so that I can control when they turn on too. But that will be a future consideration. At the suggestion of some people in my pod, I changed out the cotton balls with the roll of cotton. This ended up working way better than I had anticipated. I loosely wrapped the cotton around the stand and then tore up and fluffed up more sheets of cotton and built up around the stand.

As was mentioned in my previous post, at the time of my own conception of this idea, I did not know that someone else had already done it. So to give credit where credit is due, here is the original post.

My attempt at a LEGO Saturn V display
by u/AceReddit2 in lego