Jan 2022 – May 2022
Overview
Made for Lightning in a Bottle Festival to serve as a group totem in crowds, so we could easily find our friends in large festival spaces. It needed to be decently lightweight/portable as well as durable. It also needed to last many hours. After those needs were met, we wanted to make a large, unique design that could use an infinite palette switcher with noise for an infinite pattern.
Deliverables
- Made to last outdoors for five days of consistent usage.
- Extends 20ft into the air while remaining lightweight enough to be actively moving with it fully extended.
- Able to be moved, sustained strong wear and tear. Could be held up to 50° off axis for moving under trees and obstacles.
- Incredible brightness and battery life. 8+ hours while casting a large, bright light.
- Simple and elegant programming using FastLED. Source Link
Learning Outcomes
- This microcontroller code does not need to be complex for the effect to be large.
- Seamless experience over a large feature set.
- This project was very limited in user input and dynamics. It having moving parts/flexible lights helped make up for this limitation.
- The hardware and construction lasting the whole event was critical. Took the lessons from The Window project.