Kurt Moore of the Los Alamos National Laboratories has been busy using BEAM technology to bring technology training to the local schools in the Jemez Valley. Here's what one class did!
Because... of things... Solarbotics didn't do a booth or official presence at this year's Bay Area MakerFaire. We opted to do something fun this time, building a custom just-for-the-fair piece of sorta-interactive LED artwork. Following on the success of the quickie LED floor mandala resting area we did at the NYC MF, we turned it up to 11 for the Bay area, making a WiFi-enabled version of the same thing.
Here's the technical detail on what we did:
The project is based on a modified "Double Rainbow" controller, with the Ardweeny brains replaced by a ESP-12. We set up the three major axis as "always on", with six zones controlled by the controller for animations. We advertised the WiFi SSID point and the URL for people to login to select one of the 6 animations available.
Dan set us up a nice 10' layout cord to speed layout of the major axis:
The franken-Double-Rainbow merged with the ESP-12F.
Setup at the Faire grounds, with our co-founder & CFO, Cheryl. The darkroom (Expo hall..2?) has a very hard rubber floor, so installing them directly to the floor would have turned the LEDs to dust with all the foot traffic. It took us 2 hours and some negotiating to find a 12'x20' carpet at a local Home Depot to mount the piece.
Floor Mandala in full operation! We had zero complications with the piece, other than the WiFi point saturating and not allowing us to login ourselves. Nothing a quick reboot didn't fix.
Sunday, and the lights have just come up at the Maker Faire. Cheryl, Alan Yates, and Elizabeth (sales coordinator extraordinaire) and two other tired attendees are getting ready to wrap up.
Peel up the art and signage, and you get ...more art! Remember, this was brand new (end-of-roll) carpet. That's what several thousand dirty feet can do to a carpet over a long weekend.
Interesting thing about going from a static LED display (in NYC) to a dynamic display is people (especially children) were interacting with it as if their footsteps were making things happen. Huh. We didn't expect that. I suppose the most natural interaction with blinky lights is to turn them on and off physically (not via your cell phone). Lesson learned for next time!
Kurt Moore of the Los Alamos National Laboratories has been busy using BEAM technology to bring technology training to the local schools in the Jemez Valley. Here's what one class did!
Well, we survived the skeleton Tuesday, now it's time for Cool Links Wednesday: Mathematically Correct Breakfast: How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves Never thought math and bagels went together so well! While I am no mathematician at any rate, the intellectual stimualtion of creating a two-twist moebius strip, you can get slightly […]
We'll be shut down for the Holiday long weekend this Friday July 1st. It's Canada-Day up here, but we will be open again July 4th. Happy Holiday, y'all!
We're sorry to say that our GM11 is presently sold out. We've got more on the way, but it'll be about another month until they resurface. Sorry!
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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.