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!
Other than the new goodies, we have one more thing to announce: Solarbotics, as an official MakeFashion partner, has been supporting local and international designers by consulting, providing materials, tech support and snacks. One of the projects we have been working at is Pumping Fashion Lit (by Dee Fontans and Eric Willis). It is featured […]
Fixed a reset problem in the sumo code, turns out the a If...Then statement does not store its location on the stack. Ergo the return instruction at the bottom of the turn function was pulling a random location. Anyway a change from a return to a goto and everything is shipshape, savvy? Then download the […]
You know, I had a page of our customer testimonials put together, and I just had the opportunity to sit and read it a bit. That's a pretty impressive page, even if I do say so myself! If you have any reservation about ordering from Solarbotics, I encourage you to take a quick look at […]
What we have today are not Fairly Expensive Tortillas or Fortunately Edible Theremins, but Field-Effect Transistors. If you know what it is, I will leave you to explore: 1RFZ44N N-Channel FET $2.50 The IRFZ44N is a very powerful useful N-Channel FET, with only 0.0175ohms resistance pushing 20 amperes at 5V! FQP27P06 P-Channel FET $0.95 A […]
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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.