Sometimes, brilliant perspectives need a bit of an introduction first, and this is clearly one. This video essay by [Cleggy] delivers what it promises: an ode to the aesthetic of light. But he goes further, materializing his way of viewing things into a beautiful physical build — and the full explanation of how to do it at home.
What’s outstanding here is not just the visual result, but the path to it. We’ve covered tons of different LED matrices, and while they’re all functional, their eventual purpose is left up to the builder, like coasters or earknobs. [Cleggy] provides both. He captured a vision in the streets and then built an LED matrix from scratch.
The matrix consists of 1024 hand-soldered diodes. They’re driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico and a symphony of square waves. It’s not exactly a WS2812 plug-and-play job. It’s engineered from the silicon up, with D-latches and demultiplexers orchestrating a mesmerizing grayscale visual.
Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is the secret ingredient of this hack. [Cleggy] dims each white pixel separately, by varying the duty cycle of its light signal. The grayscale video data, compressed into CSV files, is parsed line-by-line by the Pico, translating intensity values into shimmering time slices.
It transforms the way you see and perceive things. All that, with a 1000 LED monochrome display. Light shows are all highly personal, and each one is a little different. Some of them are really kid stuff.
Kudos what a lovely final product.
Ive always wanted something nice like this to showcase random game of life runs.
But the software even on a 328 for decent FPS at 1024×1024 was easy and 10 years later I’ve never been happy with woodworking skills!
Ok…. now… what if you made another plane above the surface using a bunch of fibre optic pipes to make a mesh surfaces using the lights on the flat. Shorter ones in front longer ones in back, black tubing over each one bonded to the led so the light comes out the tip, A series of lengths over the face and a VIOLA second layer to the idea.
How is CSV compressing the video data, that’s not an efficient video container at all lmfao, a binary format would be so much better