[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl-kvfJxYwM&w=470]
The Jyväskylä, Finland hackerspace hacklab-jlk was lucky enough to work on a public arts project for their home town. They had the opportunity to design, build, and install a trio of LED cubes in Jyväskylä’s central Church Park. As such a high-profile project, the hacklab-jlk team decided to take their time and ended up implementing a lot of very cool features for their LED cubes, including simulating the light show in Blender.
The LED cube is similar to all the other LED cube builds we’ve seen before; it’s an 8x8x8 cube controlled by an ATMega328. The Elovalo project, as it is called, is a trio of LED cubes – one using red LEDs, one using green LED, and a blue LED cube each mounted on a pedestal in a Jyväskylä park.
Because the Elovalo is a permanent installation, the team needed a way to verify new firmware for the LED cubes. They came up with a LED cube simulator for Blender that allows them to write a new display function in C and render either single frames or a full animation of the lighting pattern.
A very cool build, and nearly too awesome for a public arts project. We look forward to a video of the complete installation, but until then we’ll make do with the short preview video available after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl-kvfJxYwM&w=470]
Why is the video posted twice? It’s both at the beginning and “after the break”.
Because it is.
Purple is also an incredibly tasty colour.
Cool idea.
I’d love to actually see some of the output from the blender simulation. Wasn’t able to find it anywhere.
http://youtu.be/dp5NXC4GN9U appears to be it.
Good call. Thanks!
This looks really good. I like this project a lot.
I really like the wave motion. Looks very cool.
It’s lovely, but will it blend?