Disco Isn’t Dead: Diy Dance Floor Spotted At Student Parties

Your party is lame if it doesn’t include interactive blinking lights on the dance floor. [Mario] and [Lukas] didn’t want to have lame parties, so they enlisted some fellow students to build an interactive dance floor (translated). The finished party-piece is 4 meters by 2.5 meters (that’s about 13’x8′ for us yanks) and includes 160 lighted squares. But it’s the electronics that really make this a heavy project.

Milled into the underside of the pressboard base are a series of pockets and channels to hold various components. If you look hard enough, you’re going to find eight AVR microcontrollers which control the LEDs, 8 CPLDs to manage the weight sensors which make the floor interactive, and an FPGA and embedded computer to tie everything together. It’s movable, a hit at parties, and so far it seems to hold up to the occasional spilled beverage.

You can’t share a project like this without some video. See it after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um1bMXSOXw8&w=470]

16 thoughts on “Disco Isn’t Dead: Diy Dance Floor Spotted At Student Parties

  1. @t&p

    plexiglass has somewhere over an order of magnitude in concussive strength over plate glass. crazing (those aesthetic wear fractures you see in plastics) is a huge problem with plexi though so some math would have to be done for minimum thickness…. or just have fun stomping on some samples.

  2. It would be thousand times more interesting if they did some kind of dance dance revolution with these floors. Or something more simple: VU meter, that takes their position as origin, so if you want VU meters near your feet, you gotta move around!

  3. YEP , THIS is the kinda’ floor I want in my pad. Carpet and tile is so 90’s. Its 2011 , give me LED / interactive / marquee / & programmable floors. *With robots cleaning them.*

    I hate vacuuming my dirty floors, (you mean you gotta use your hands, thats like a baby’s toy)

  4. Hey Guys,

    thanks for the comments.

    @t&p: We had very complex process for optimizing the plexi thickness: buy the thickest you can afford. It’s 8mm here as Plexiglass is rather expensive. However this is enough even for heavy people and for high heels as well! (The whole floor costs about 5000 USD.)

    And yeah we are into Big Bang Theory :-)

    Yours,
    Lukas

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