I have the privilege of working for an amazing company, TMG. We host a consultant training and client trade show that is a hectic few days of training, product demos, and client meetings. The best part is I get the honor of participating in the Future Directions keynote presentation.

This post is not about the presentation, which focused on Copilot; it is about the shenanigans around the presentation. I’ll dive into Copilot from a development perspective soon.

With the rollout of Business Central 24 and the additions of Copilot features in the Power Platform and Power BI we had a lot to share. With all the focus on Copilot, we thought we should be the pilots!

Here we are, Savannah Dill on the left, Brian Leale on the right, and me in the middle. The crazy thing here is that Brian is an actual pilot, the other two are just goofballs with hats.

We scattered a few jokes from the movie Airplane! They didn’t land as well as I would have liked. I didn’t realize it was released back in 1980, a full 44 years ago. One of our presenters hadn’t even seen it! Airplane! (1980) – IMDb

What are Pilots without wings?

The wings were a purple as close to our company colors as I could make and the Copilot logo had rainbow colors that slowly rotated around the circle. My camera just couldn’t sort out the rainbow. It really struggled with the purple as well, something about how the LEDs generate the light was doing bad things to the color balance.

The wings and logo are cut out of 1/2-inch acrylic using the 80-watt CO2 laser at my local Makerspace. I created the cut plan using LightBurn. After laser cutting the edges were flame polished.

Laser cutting acrylic is one of my favorite things. You can cut intricate shapes, but also etch fine detail lines and ablate away entire sections to create the frosted look I have here.

The lights are WS2812B pixel strips I purchased on Amazon. WS2812B LED Strip 144Pixels/m. The controller for all the pixels is a WEMOS Lolin 32, which is hidden in the base of the wings. Everything is powered by USB.

The wooden base was made with scrap oak wood from the Makerspace with help from my better three quarters, Dottie.

The little wings are just a scaled down version of the big one with purple LEDs and CR2032 batteries powering them.

You can find all the files for the wings, 3D printed bases, and Arduino code here: AardvarkMan/Vision2024Wings (github.com)

If you want to learn more about working with controllable LED lights, check out my Ultimate Blinkin Light Class I made several years ago: AardvarkMan/UltimateBlinkinLightClass (github.com)