Inspired by a recent post for the YUM signs,

Archive FastLED Archive
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Inspired by a recent post for the YUM signs, I’m putting out a call for animations! I have 5 days before I leave for Burning Man and my imagination is waning while my motivation to add animations is growing.

I have a staff (for spinning/walking) that is 6-foot long, with 6 strips of LEDs (~100 on each) running along its length, meaning ~3.5 strips are visible to any person at a given time. For reference, here’s a video I made a while back:

It does react to being stomped (on the ground), as well as spun, if you want to get creative, but I care mostly about nice-looking/interesting patterns. It uses an X,Y grid layout, where Xmax = 6 and Ymax = 108 (ish, depending on the build), and I have a function XY(x,y) to map to the right LED.

A friend of mine made this playground app:

http://gabes-giant-staff.herokuapp.com/

Where you can make an animation and then “share” a link with the code (or copy-paste the code here). Or just normal FastLED code works, too! Or just ideas! Really anything to get me inspired. :slight_smile:

Thanks for any ideas people can offer!

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That’s a very cool playground application, and I’m wondering about the hardware and library that drives those LED’s. Maybe there’s a github repo somewhere?

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There is but so far I’ve kept it private (for the controller code). Hardware is a Teensy 3.1 with LSM9DS0 accel/gyro. I have a BOM for the parts:

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nice contact,
still searching for some way to make a pixel poi
is there any example to share? thx

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What an awesome build!

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It looks like the LEDs are shrinkwrapped, but the BoM says you’re using a carbon-fibre tube. Is this some sort of visual distortion?

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It’s using both – the carbon fiber tube is underneath the LEDs, and houses the batteries and the electronics

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Interesting. How thick is the heatshrink around the LEDs? Do you have any concerns about durability?

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It’s about 2mm. Concerns, yes, but so far not a single LED has failed. I haven’t been babying it and it’s holding up. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, though.

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This is the best LED staff I’ve ever seen! I just finished one for Burning Man but yours has so many great solutions. Great previz app too. About how long does it last on those Li-ions?

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Thanks! I’ve put a ton of work into it.

There’s 20Ah of batteries, and they last 8-16 hours (full brightness, half brightness respectively). In short: all night and some. :slight_smile:

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As for patterns my code is embarrassingly crude right now so forgive me for holding off on sharing, but I’ve had some luck in making simple particles and sending them off along the length of the staff. Interesting stuff happens when you trigger a bunch of them and add easing/falloff and trail effects.

One pattern I wanted to do but didn’t have time to implement is a 1d wave equation, like this:

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See how Sparks goes for you!
Header: https://github.com/tullo-x86/kaiju2015/blob/master/kaiju_2014/Patterns/SparksPattern.h , and
source: https://github.com/tullo-x86/kaiju2015/blob/master/kaiju_2014/Patterns/SparksPattern.cpp

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Oh great tips guys! I love those 1d normals - I’ll see if I can figure out how to make an animation out of them :).

Is there a video of the Sparks animation? It’s a little tough to visualize it from the code. However that code looks reasonable portable, and I could run an “instance” of it on each strand maybe to have six in-parallel without too many code modifications.

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If you want to instance SparksPattern fully, you’ll need to pull SparksPattern::_sparks into the instance and allocate memory for it – it’s statically allocated in kaiju2015 because I had to cram it and a bunch of other patterns (plus a radio library) into memory!

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@Kurt_Kaminski do you have a formula for the 1d wave equation you referenced? I’m having trouble putting it together myself, but I can see a lot of potential in using it! Since I can measure a “stomp” on the ground, I could use that to add “wave energy” to the animation for a very cool effect.

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@Gabriel_Schine ​ sorry I’m traveling and can’t get you any code but if you search for 1d wave equation algorithm you’ll find some solutions for it. I’m guessing the teensy should be able to handle one row of LEDs which you can copy to the other 5. There might be a cheaper easier solution that looks similar, I’d say go for it and just try to do the PDE, it’ll look amazing if you hook it into a ground stomp move! When I get back from burning man I’ll check in. Good luck!