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!
It's another Friday and we are back with the product that makes sense - it is metric! It is not measured in twips, poppyseeds, barleycorns, yards, furlongs, or any of this funny stuff. It's your good old straightforward decimals. Metric 2.5mm Hex Nut - 25 Pack $4.00 Metric M2.5 Hex Nut, in packs of 25, […]
Here's a new portion of links to brighten the otherwise unremarkable day. Beat Blox A simple and elegant way to visualize sound and tangibly control it. (Via Creative Applications) Heart Bot Drawn with sound, vibration, sunlight, now draw with heartbeat! Now that's how it's supposed to be. (Via Designboom) New map shows where the Milky […]
Bad news, everyone - we don't have any new OR shiny things to show off today. That's because we've been busy packing up to attend the Calgary Comic Expo, which runs this weekend, from the 27th to the 29th. We have a booth set up and will be showing off some of our cool stuff, […]
Hi all. For all you Sumovore-owners, just a note to let you know that the new Atmel-WinAVR code is online (Atmel brainboard page under resources). Just some tweaks to make it compatible with the latest versions of WinAVR. Also, Dan Peirce has ported the JAL portion of the '877 brains to the Hi-Tech PICCLite compiler, […]
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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.