What do you do with all of these Amazon boxes? Reduce, Reuse, Recycle? You can reuse them by building a gigantic cardboard geodesic dome that’s big enough to have weird serendipitous meetings inside.
My big dome was intended to be a meta hackathon project. Here’s the idea:
- Collect all the cardboard needed
- Recruit a team of hackers for the hackathon
- Build the dome on the first day of the hackathon
- Get everyone in the dome and produce a mini incubator of little ideas.
First: Math. A geodesic dome is an approximation of (roughly) half of a sphere, split into triangular faces. The way this is usually visualized is by starting with an icosahedron (which has 20 triangular faces) and then dividing each trinangular face into smaller triangles. More triangles makes for a closer approximation to a hemisphere, but requires more work. Domes are are often described with a “V” frequency, which indicates how many times each edge of the icosahedron is subdivided.
This website was, and continues to be, the best resource for understanding domes, and includes a calculator for planning of the 3V dome I initially had in mind.
However! The calculators on this site are intended for strut-based domes - they generate the lengths of triangle edges, and we want to know what size cardboard panels to cut. This worksheet I created to plan this pulls base strut measurements from the calculator and then converts them into panel dimensions and counts.
A 3V dome still only requires 2 different types of triangular panel, and it’s probably a good compromise on roundedness. However, because I’m apperently an insane person, I instead decided to build a 6V dome, which has 360 panels in 6 different sizes.
Next: Collect and cut cardboard panels. Picking the flattest pieces fron delivery boxes without creases took me months, cutting a few panels before work each day.
Then: Stick all the panels together. Did I find a good technique for this? Not really. I started from the top and worked around in a spiral. Also - this needs a lot of really good tape. Reinforced gum tape is good and stong, and probably needs masking tape to hold it while it dries.
Timelapses!
Turns out that sticking 360 carboard panels together takes a lot longer than an optimist might have assumed. This took days and nights to finish. There were over 1000 paper tape joints and nearly 200 corner reinforcements.
The finished dome was 4 meters across and I have so few photos of it.
Then, of course, there’s nothing left to do but create a fake AirBNB listing.
Look at those hilariously 2016 AirBNB prices.