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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Neopixels Light The Way In Pressure-Sensitive Floor

November 7, 2016 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

It’s got a little “Saturday Night Fever” vibe to it, but this pressure-sensitive LED floor was made for gaming, not for dancing.

Either way, [creed_bratton_]’s build looks pretty good. The floor is a 5×6 grid of thick HDPE cutting boards raised up on a 2×4 lumber frame. Each cell has a Neopixel ring and a single force-sensitive resistor to detect pressure on the pad. Two 16-channel multiplexers were needed to consolidate the inputs for the Arduino that’s running the show, and a whole bunch of wall warts power everything. The video below shows a little of the build and a look under the tiles. It’s not clear exactly what game this floor is for, but you can easily imagine a maze or some other puzzle that needs to be solved with footsteps.

Light-up floors are nothing new here, what with this swimming pool dance floor. But this interactive dance floor comes close to the gaming aspect of [creed_bratton_]’s build.

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Swimming Pool Dance Floor Enlightened With Leds

October 24, 2015 by Rud Merriam 11 Comments

In a well documented blog entry, [Loren Bufanu] presents a project that lit up a glass dance floor covering a swimming pool with RGB strips. We mentioned a video of his project in a Hackaday links but didn’t have any background information. Now we do.

The project took around 450 meters of RGB strips controlled by two Rainbowduinos and driven by sixty-four power Mosfets, sixty-four bipolar transistors, and a few other components. Producing white light from the LEDs draws 8 amps from the power supply.

The Rainbowduino is an ATmega328 Arduino compatible board with two MY9221 controllers. Each controller handles 12 channels of Adaptive Pulse Density Modulation. In other words, it makes the LEDs flash nicely. [Loren] used the Rainbowduino instead of some alternatives because multiple R’duinos can coordinate their activities over I2C.

The software part of the project did not work as well as the hardware. The light patterns were supposed to follow the music being played. A PC software package intended to drive the R’duinos produced just a muddy mess. Some kludges, including screen captures (!), driven by a batch file tamed the unruliness.

It’s been awhile, but a similar disco dance floor, built by [Chris Williamson] but not over a pool, previously caught our attention. [Chris] is a principle in Terror Tech that recently got a mention on Sparkfun.

The video after the break fortunately does not make a big splash, but is still electrifying.

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

June 18, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

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.

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