Chroma – Mesmerizing LED Driven Fractal Display

chroma in action

A big fan of generative art, [Andrew Magill] wanted to build an LED display for his wall that constantly displayed images from the Electric Sheep project.  After discounting the possibility of generating these fractals on the fly, he settled on using prerecorded video clips gathered over a year’s time by Electric Sheep users.  With thousands of video clips in hand, he wrote some custom software that enabled him to sequence these 5-second video clips into just over 6 hours of video, which he later downsampled to fit his 24×16 pixel display.

Now that he had some impressive video put together, [Andrew] began designing the LED panels he would use to show off his creation.  After choosing TI TLC5947 drivers to control the LED arrays, he got to work on designing the PCBs, soldering in all of the components, and testing the displays.  Initial testing completed, he wrote some more custom software to direct the individual LED boards from a master controller, and mounted everything in a frosted-glass adorned picture frame.

Be sure to check out mesmerizing video of Chroma in action after the break.

[flickr video=http://www.flickr.com/photos/amagill/5318924313/]

[via flickr]

15 thoughts on “Chroma – Mesmerizing LED Driven Fractal Display

  1. Pretty cool and a neat exercise. But I wonder how much more/less work it would be to recycle a laptop LCD display and play the actual fractal video. One could remove the CCFL and replace it with some bright white LEDs and leave it on forever. A PIC for FB and keep the rest of the system to decode the video.

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