From an idea on a coffee shop napkin to a series of advanced individually addressable LED displays across three years of development.
PROJECT FEATURES
Electronics
Software
Fabrication
LED DISPLAYS
From an idea on a coffee shop napkin to a series of advanced individually addressable LED displays across three years of development.
PROJECT FEATURES
Electronics
Software
Fabrication
Of all of the projects I've ever done, this is the only one that literally started out on the back of a coffee shop napkin.
On a ferry boat from Copenhagen to Oslo, looking up at the stars, I was thinking about the huge number of satellites passing silently overhead. I thought it would be cool if there was some way to visualize all of this orbital traffic, and the first iteration of this idea was to replace some ceiling tiles with panels that would light up to indicate the presence of an overhead satellite. Struck with inspiration, I flipped over my napkin and started taking notes.
I had barely touched an Arduino at this point, let alone create the hardware and software for a project like this. But back home in New York, I got to work.
Using small plywood squares, an Arduino Uno, and an led strip off of Amazon, I began experimenting with a subscale version of what I had been imagining.
By the time I made it back to school in the fall, I was ready to scale up. Instead of being ceiling mounted, the display was going to be a wall decoration. It was important to me that it not be an eye sore when powered off, so the squares of the original design gave way to hexagons. A length of individually addressable LED strip was glued to the edge of each hexagon, and the junctions at each corner were bridged with solder and 126 painstakingly hand formed 120 degree jumper wires. In sum, this display had 336 individual LEDs, all controlled by an Arduino Mega hidden behind the center hexagon.
However, the hidden Arduino was only part of the story. I bought a graphic equalizer display filter from Sparkfun which takes audio from an inline aux cable and splits it into 7 different frequency channels. Using a Teensy 3.6 microcontroller, I could take that audio output, run peak detection, Fast Fourier Transforms, or just use the amplitude and make my panels pulse in time with the music playing on my speakers. So the Teensy would run "big picture" control and communicate instructions to the Arduino over i2c, which would in turn instruct each of the LED pixels.
