Daunting Interactive LED Dancefloor Build Is Huge Win

March 24, 2017 by Jenny List 13 Comments

If you’ve ever thought about having a light-up dance floor at an event, the chances are you will have been shocked at the rental cost. Doing your best impression of a young John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever doesn’t come cheap, it seems. When faced with this problem before the Furnal Equinox 2017 convention, [Av] and friends decided instead to build their own LED-lit floor.

Their design and build is shown in the video we’ve placed below the break, and though each individual light unit is straightforward it is the scale of the project and its epic build that makes it a very impressive achievement. There are 64 panels of 4 light cells, giving a total of 256 cells and 7680 RGB LEDs arranged as 2560 pixels. Each panel has a shift register PCB interfacing LEDs to the Teensy that controls the floor, and there are also microswitches talking to an Arduino Mega which provides the floor with interactivity. It’s hard to imaging this build would be possible without the people numerous who pitched in at the Toronto Hacklab for the assembly process.

The resulting 17 foot square dancefloor is a work of art, with custom programmed graphics responding to dancers moves, and even a few games along the lines of Dance Dance Revolution built in. After watching the video below, how many of you will secretly want one?

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Lose Yourself To Dance

June 26, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Not every project for The Hackaday Prize needs to solve a pressing concern, save the planet, or help people. Sometimes, it just needs to be cool. [Jeremy]’s project is certainly cool. He’s building a touch-sensitive disco floor for the awesomeness of Saturday Night Fever combined with the technical complexity of the Billy Jean music video.

We’ve seen a few disco floor builds over the years, and for the most part, [Jeremy] isn’t straying too far from a well-tread path. He’s using LED strips to light his build, cutting the frame for the floor out of plywood and translucent squares, and using an ATMega to control each panel. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

The trick to this build is that every square has a capacitive touch sensor. Underneath each translucent panel is a bit of wire mesh. Because the disco floor has 144 nodes, running the standard capacitive sensor library just wouldn’t work; the delay in measuring each node adds up very fast. By rewriting [Paul Stoffregen]’s capacitive sensor library, [Jeremy] was able to run many panels at once.

Right now [Jeremy] has a single panel that responds equally well to bare feet as it does to motorcycle boots. It’s exactly what you need in an interactive dance floor, and we can’t wait to seen the entire floor running.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Robotic Disco Floor Is A Mobile Party

September 18, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

[Chris Williamson] designed the Rave Rover, a mobile disco floor with integrated stripper pole for this year’s DragonCon.

[Chris] started building combat robots back in 2000 for Battlebots and Robot Wars and cofounded the South Eastern Combat Robot league. He’s a lover and not a fighter, so for the DragonCon robotics track [Chris] built his mobile dance party. He put up an Instructable of his build and some of the features are really clever. Whenever the dance floor is being ‘used’, pneumatic cylinders lower the disco floor so it rests directly on the ground. A good idea, especially considering what we imagine happens on the Rave Rover.

For the light-up disco floor, [Chris] cut black ABS sheets on a CNC router and installed RGB LED modules controlled by an Arduino. The floor can display low-res animations, but random patterns look just a cool.

The Rave Rover was designed and built over a one month span to get ready in time for DragonCon. The build was a little hurried but the quality is still there. Check out video of the Rave Rover at DragonCon after the break.

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