So far, I’ve mostly nailed down what I want the general appearance / behavior of my project to be like. I decided to move away from a “fragile” object (for the sake of construction and re-using material) to a “precarious” one, maybe. It’ll be triggered by light, and the general aesthetic will be more lamp(?)-based, although it will still stand, rather than hang.

Roughly half of the material I’ve ordered hasn’t yet arrived, so I’ve built a couple extremely simplistic models to test out coding and the cutting mechanism. So far I’ve gotten LEDs and a servo to respond to a photoresistor, and made it so that the photoresistor responds more to ambient light than to the LED… The actual cutting mechanism needs more work; I’m a little concerned about the tension of the string(s) that will be holding the object together.