Guess where this guy’s headed in his suit of many colors? If you said Burning Man give your self a pat on the back. After making a half-hearted EL suit for the festival in 2010 [Sander] decided he needed to step it up this year. He bought and affixed 200 LED modules to this suit so that he could light up the night.
They’re mounted in a grid, and in order to keep the changing patterns orderly he mapped the physical location of each in his code using a two-dimensional array. The controller uses an Arduino nano to push the patterns out to the array via SPI.
[Sander] included several different visual effects for the controller. One strobes the suit starting from the right cuff when he shakes someone’s hand. There’s also an audio spectrum analyzer chip and microphone that let him pulse the lights to music. You can see how bright this thing is in the image above, but to get the full effect shouldn’t skip the video after the break.
He’s entered the project into the Full Spectrum Laser Cutter giveaway. If he wins, we expect laser cut goodness for next year’s festival!
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/29552399 w=470]
[via Build Lounge]
I am a software engineer that is just getting into hardware stuff… I bought my first arduino a few weeks ago… I am wondering if anyone has any links/insight into how he managed to individually control all of these LEDs with the few output pins of the arduino. I have read a bit about digital pots and some other integrated circuits… so I’m assuming there’s some working going on with those or something similar… Any insight would be a benefit to my ever growing understanding of hardware design…
Search for Arduino shift register. That is one method that can be used.
These are SPI modules, so he doesn’t have to have one pin per (200 modules x 3 smd LED’s) or shift registers. Each module on the bus is addressable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Peripheral_Interface_Bus
You could also Charlieplex them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlieplexing
To be clear, you could charlieplex each individual LED, not the actual SPI busses…
Please note the section LED failure in the wiki page. A large charlie-plexed matrix containing a failed led will make you a sad camper.
It’s a BURNING MAN!!!
:)
try something like:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/306
There are many others.
GE Color effects christmas lights work the same way.
All you need is +5v, ground, and a data wire.
This guy was at CCCamp. I was sad that he didn’t have any LED’s on his ass. :(
Have you seen this rather old (2008) beast:
You can control light waves and other stuff through the suit by touching sensors on the luminet nodes at – for example – your wrists. It is generally quite interactive and communicates via meshed networking.