Some build photos from the lighting design George...

8th February 2013

Video with 25 notes

Some build photos from the lighting design George and I created for Ra Ra Riot’s 2013 US tour. The set up consists of 12 LED poles, 3 LED boxes, and 8 DMX colorblast fixtures. LEDs are mounted behind frosted acrylic (Acrylite ‘Satin Ice’) to diffuse the light evenly.

Each unit is operating from it’s own dedicated Arduino. The boxes needed more RAM and faster clock speed to drive all 576 LEDs, so I went with the Teensy 3.0. For the poles, an Arduino Micro could handle the amount of LEDs with no problem. At the helm of the Arduinos is an Adafruit FTDI Friend that communicates one way to all 16 at once. Each Arduino has its own internal address and receives 14 byte packets of data telling it what to do (rate, pattern, color, brightness).

All patterns are baked into the Arduino code- that way if there’s ever a serial disconnect, the lights will continue to run. In addition to the pattern data, the computer sends a heartbeat 10 times a second, insuring they stay in sync for patterns like color fading and strobing.

A processing sketch running on the computer controls everything, and is extended further to use an iPad for wireless control via touchOSC and oscP5. We are working on an update for a Lemur sketch to offer even more control.

They’ll be touring around with them for the next couple months:

http://rarariot.com/shows/

All code available here:

https://github.com/jmzjmzjmz/ufo

The code is expanded from these previous projects, also collaborated on with George Brower:

https://vimeo.com/42359451

https://vimeo.com/43509251