The Tiniest Lightbox

Today, I looked around at all the balsa/3mm ply wood samples on my desk in work and thought, what can I use these for, other than the obvious answer of burning weird images into them…

Between the samples and an old ‘fire exit’ sign (the ones that light up in an emergency) that i’d been planning to reface with something interesting, I decided to try and make a prototype for some bespoke wooden light-boxes - the catch was that I had a maximum face area of 75mm.

With a simple enough construction, as below, and some laser etched, matt-black vinyl applied to 3mm acrylic for the face, we have a tiny little frog-beacon that would scale up pretty well.