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!
Ok, besides being a conjunction of two things we really love (Make Magazine & BEAM Robotics), it also is an open-source hardware project that is about little "T-Beams". This project is using the "KickStarter" model of sponsorship. Ask for pledges for the projects, and if the minimum is met (and it has - yay!), the […]
It comes to our attention from J Wolfgang Goerlich that he won the ECRG Walker competition with the "Servocore Walker" he built from a project in our "Bicore Experimenter's PCB" bundle! See more details about his walker here.
Boy oh boy, it's been a busy week for PICAXE stuff. We actually got a big ol' shipment in late last week, which included the new 40X2 chips. And by now we've receiveded everything, including even more X2 chips. But this time they're of the 28-pin variety. (Don't worry, the 28X1's haven't gone the way […]
(Thanks for the interest - welcome Chris to the team!) Our IT task at Solarbotics have grown beyond "Did you try turning it off and then on again?", so we're in the hiring market for an IT Guru & website manager. Please, we're only interested in applicants that can work here, in Calgary, Alberta. Sorry, […]
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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.