Decorative Lamp Using Clear Balls and B0 Struts

The greatest thing about Zometool is its versatility and geometric lessons to be discovered, even when the types of struts are limited. 

We just added some exciting new items to our inventory: A bunch of clear Zome balls and B0 struts in Blue.

Buy B0 Struts in Blue (100-pack) Buy Zome Balls in Clear (100-pack)

I wanted to explore building a structure of "kissing" balls, that is, balls that are adjacent, using only B0 struts. The "kissing" Zome balls would be the clear balls. The basic element is a simple trapezoid, built in the 5-plane, that is, with the pentagonal hole of the ball facing up. They touch on the rectangular faces of the Zome balls. 

Building a trapezoid of B2 struts, we can see that the short side of the trapezoid is a B0 length. This tells us that when we scale the size down twice by the Golden Ratio to B0 struts, the short side of the trapezoid would use a B000 (or B-2) strut which would have no physical length but just be two opposing nubs. The actual length of that side is the diameter of the ball. 

I wanted to see how many "kissing" balls I could fit next to each other. I decided to base my model on the icosidodecahedron, what one would get if they made an "urchin" out of blue struts (particularly B1) and connected the nodes with B0 struts. 

  The size of this inner hemisphere of adjacent balls was looking about the size of a lightbulb. However, a lightbulb was too big. Maybe there are smaller lightbulbs out there, but I decided to open my stash of electronics supplies and busted out a 12x RGB Neopixel ring, which fit perfectly, and an Arduino. So I used a little basic light pattern and affixed it in the center with some extra B0 struts.

I finished it off by elevating the light sculpture with a few R0 struts in Pink, and some R2 struts in Pink. This gave the inner pieces some occlusion, and made it look like a mushroom or proper lamp. The bottom needed stabilization so I added a star pattern to the bottom of the R2 struts using some B1 struts. 

Buy R0 Struts in Pink (100-pack) Buy R2 Struts in Pink (100-pack) Buy Zome Balls (Specify colors) (100-pack)

This is the view through a 2-axis:

Here's an image of a shadow of the model projected from the center through a piece of paper: