The SoundPuddle project drives thousands of LEDs based on audio input. The team is working on a replacing the controller for this wire-filled setup with something more robust. They took the mess seen above to the Apogaea Festival and were plagued by loose wires and unreliable communications due to noise and interference. The aim of the new system is to reliably control up to 10,000 LEDs.

The red PCB seen at the center of the rats-nest is a Papilio FPGA board. They still want to use it to drive the installation, but a new hardware interface is necessary. The solution is to design what they call a megawing (wings are to Papilio as shields are to Arduino).  The LEDs will be in RGB strip form, so one of the requirements is to supply enough connectors to drive 16 channels of SPI devices. The wing will also include the 48V power source and connectors for the condenser microphone that serves as an input for the SoundPuddle. There are also two other options for audio input, one via a Bluetooth module (which can double as a control device) and the other via MIDI.

After the break you can see a lighting demo. Be ready with the volume controls as most of the sounds used in the test are quite annoying.

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