Fake snow from an Arduino

posted Dec 21st 2009 8:00am by
filed under: arduino hacks, led hacks

The team at [Sosolimited] was contracted to create an interesting holiday window dispay for the HBO retail store in NYC. The Times Square display encorporates a board of LEDs and a machine for blowing the artificial snow particles around the enclosure.

The code for controlling the LED array was written on top of the open source C++ toolkit, openFrameworks and the entire setup is interfaced through an Arduino Duelmilanove. Multiple Sharp IR sensors were hooked up to the Arduino in order to detect the movement of observers, which in turn triggers fans to blow the ‘snow’ around. A National Control Devices relay board connects the heavy duty fans to the Arduino. This video demo shows just how attractive the project is in motion.



12 Responses to Fake snow from an Arduino

  • James says:

    I like it, inventive.

  • angrydroid says:

    Awesome. Love it.

  • sneakypoo says:

    Any headaches they might’ve had during the making of this was surely erased by the smiles on those kids faces. Oh to be a kid again.

  • samurai says:

    It’s very cool, but far less spectacular than I thought it was going to be. Why did the fans shut off when people stopped moving? It woulda been cool to see the columns of snow be a “people tracker”!

  • HackJack says:

    The window is short and from the video it is hard to feel the relationship between people and snow movement.

    I mean think about it, why would snow blow up when people walk by?

    If the sensor detects people jumping up and down, or react to sound, it would make more sense and gives a better presentation.

  • MClaus says:

    I saw this today! I thought it was really nifty. It definitely cheered me up on the way back to the port authority.

  • Neckbeard says:

    Yay! just what Hackers need, yet another Arduino.

  • Dog says:

    But Arduinos are free, didnt you know? Errr wait can’t find a link to a site selling them for free…

  • chris says:

    Worst fake snow ever!

  • JamesDX says:

    Anyone know how to do things like this?

  • Leave a Reply

    XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title="" rel=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

    Hack a Day serves up fresh hacks each day, every day from around the web as well as hacking related news.

    Send us your hacks






         




    Hacks

    Resources