Starlight is built. I haven't ordered the boards.

A black 2-by-4-foot Starlight panel leaning against white cabinets, with dozens of warm white fiber optic stars lit across it — A Starlight panel, August 2026.

Starlight is the star ceiling kit that grew out of the first ceiling in my basement theater. I’ve built the provisioning flow, the order flow and the website to sell it, and the boards are ready to be ordered in bulk. The controller case looks really nice, and it’s complete.

But I’ve stalled.

A black 3D-printed Starlight controller case on a desk, with a constellation and the Starlight name on its textured lid and two green screw terminals on the side — The Starlight controller case.

The bulk order

I don’t have any data showing it will actually sell. The boards cost a lot more each in a batch of two to five than in a batch of about 100, so the order that makes sense is the big one. It’s daunting. I’m afraid of ending up with a closet full of boards that nobody buys.

Kits, not panels

I’m not ready to sell finished panels that slip into a cardboard box and ship. I’m only prepared to sell DIY kits, and even then, there’s still a lot that the end user needs to do, and a lot that I would have to do too.

A kit is the controller and two LED manifolds, with the ferrules and fiber optics that insert into them. On my side, I print the 70 ferrules that go into the two manifolds, and each ferrule gets a specific length of fiber. A few of the ferrules carry a small cluster of fibers instead of one, which is how 70 LEDs light 110 stars. Then there’s cutting, bagging, labeling the bags, and gluing fiber into each ferrule. By hand, that’s about 2 hours per kit, and gluing the fibers into the individual ferrules takes the longest.

The customer still buys the substrate and paints it or wraps it in dark fabric. They drill the 110 holes for the fibers, insert the fibers and glue them in. Even after my kit, the customer probably still has another 2 to 4 hours per panel.

The back of a Starlight panel: a brown board with fiber optic strands running from holes marked with small numbered stickers to two black LED manifolds in the middle, and a green controller board near the bottom — The back of an early Starlight panel.

Pricing it to pay for the run

I’ve never tried a preorder or a waitlist on the Starlight site. The idea interests me, because I’d price the kits so that any sales would effectively fund the run, including my time and labor.

Those prices feel too expensive for a kit for a single 2-by-4 panel. Knowing how much work the customer still has after the kit, I’d pay the low end myself, maybe. It’s tight, but that would cover it.

So I’m going to try a preorder. I haven’t decided how many preorders it would take before I order the boards.