Okay, so today I decided to mess around with creating Japanese star patterns. You know, those cool designs you see sometimes? I’ve always been kinda fascinated by them, so I figured, why not give it a shot?
Getting Started
First things first, I needed a way to, like, actually draw the stars. I’m not about to do this by hand, no way. So, I jumped on my computer and fired up my trusty code editor. I’m most comfortable with Python, so that’s what I went with. It’s pretty chill for simple stuff like this.
The Process
I started by trying to remember how the heck basic geometry works. It’s been a while since high school, haha. I knew I needed to figure out the angles and points of a star. After some serious head-scratching and a bit of Googling, I remembered something about using sine and cosine for this kind of thing.
- Brainstorming: Thought about how stars are basically just a bunch of points connected in a specific way.
- Coding Fumbles: Tried a few different ways to calculate the points. Lots of trial and error here!
- Debugging: Realized I messed up the angle calculations…multiple times. Whoops.
So, I wrote some Python code that basically uses sine and cosine to calculate the x and y coordinates of each point of the star. I made it so I could easily change the number of points, too. Five-pointed stars are classic, but I wanted to experiment with, like, seven-pointed stars and even crazier ones.
The Result
After a bunch of tweaking and fixing my (many) mistakes, I finally got it working! I could create stars with any number of points I wanted. It was super satisfying to see those shapes pop up on my screen. I even added some color to make them look extra fancy.
It’s not perfect,and to be honest the code is a bit clunky, but it was a fun little project. It definitely reminded me how much I enjoy just messing around with code and seeing what I can create. Maybe next time I’ll try animating them or something. We’ll see!
