Thought I would share what I have been working on and thank the FastLed community for being so jaw droppingly amazing and inspiring.
Ceramadelics is a collaboration between ceramic artist Bridget Fox of Mudventions and myself. I do the electronic firmware and hardware and she does the amazing art.
The light sculptures are made of glazed translucent Porcelain and the electronics hide inside and light up the shell and glaze usually with colored LEDs. The hardware is always custom, always changing ;), and I try and incorporate 3D printing whenever and wherever I can.
These light pieces have been a passion of ours for a long time and are always evolving. We have about 6 for now that we regularly take around with us and show at festivals and events. They usually are battery powered and sit on freestanding tripod pedestals and have enough battery power to last all night… The pieces are interactive and change patterns based on touch.
Lately I have been migrating from an older control board to a new one that interfaces WS2812 style LEDs. The new board has 6 channels (only 5 work for now) and uses the ESP8266 WeMOS D1 mini as the micro and the FastLED library! Hopefully at some point I can get this hooked up to ArtNET and possibly make at least one of these wirelessly DMX controllable.
Big thanks to @Jason_Coon of Evil Genius Labs for laying the ground work for this new board. I switched his design to surface mount 74HCT245 and Molex Minifit for output to the strips and a small amount of support circuitry for other functions specific to our light pieces.
For a test of the new hardware I 3D printed an armature and stuffed all this into one of our earlier pieces called the BrainScrambler. We are calling this the BrainScrambler ReScrambled. (The piece is about 16" across and 6" high, 120 LEDs divided into 5 strips, for now its just running a rainbow routine. I am just starting to dip my toe into the FastLed library)
Thanks for all the hard work that’s been done in the development of this library and all the innovation pushing this art form further along… There is truly no way we could pull off something this neat all on our own.
Love the look of that pottery how it looks brain like! Nice glazing work too. Props to Bridget Fox.
And that’s cool you’ve make your own boards. What a great collaboration! I want to see more when you have more LED patterns worked out.
@marmil Looking forward to more patterns also. For starters I am trying to get some spin patterns going around the circumference petal to petal. I’ve got something going but its a bit to blinky The rainbow feature of FastLED was a pleasant surprise. I have only played with strip LEDs in one other piece and it took me quite a while to get a nice rainbow fade effect. It was really easy with FastLED.
This new controller/LEDS will be a learning curve as the old controller was just an 8bit PIC and single 3Watt RGB with constant current drive and PWM… Still got nice patterns but having 120 LEDs is a whole new ballgame.
If you want to check out more of Bridgets stuff she has a great instagram feed. Thanks for the positive feedback! i will pass your comments on to Bridget also.
@Juergen_Bruegl Yes funny you should mention that as I notice the effect too. As we build these up, each one has a personality. It might help that we name them too Thanks for nice comment.
@Post-Master_Sodium Yes, thank you for the nice compliment and for the inspiration to post up our work the forum here.
I feel very fortunate to have such an amazing artist to work with.
Thanks also for your battery suggestion. I got mine in the mail and its working great with this piece. Its easily 1/5 the size of my old SLA and does not require a power converter or a fancy charger. Should get me 12 ours or so of runtime. Sweet!!!
@Mike_Clifford I thought about it about and might offer them in the future. They would need a respin for sure and I still need to work out the first channel that’s trying to run off of D0 its not working at all. For now you may want to check out @Jason_Coon board from Evil Genius Lab. I leaned on his design heavily for mine and would have gone with it all together except I wanted to add some circuitry specific to our light pieces and also use the Mini Molex plugs which I like
@Post-Master_Sodium sadly we will not be making Oregon Eclipse fest but will be taking them to a local Eclipse Fest closer to us on the East Coast. We have had them out in the past to regional burns Lakes of Fire up north and Transformus which use to be held near Asheville NC. We take them out to Festivals whenever we can as its a great way to show them off and its really fun to watch people interact with them. Hope the Hoop Skirt goes over well this weekend. Have fun in the daytime Dark!!!
@Stephen_Co thanks for the nice compliment. Still working on some more patterns but trying to avoid too much blinking
We got to take this one out to an eclipse festival over the weekend and it went over well. Lots of people got to enjoy it. People often have a hard time understanding they are made out of clay; it’s fun to watch the light go on…
The rainbow feature of FastLED was a pleasant surprise. I have only played with strip LEDs in one other piece and it took me quite a while to get a nice rainbow fade effect. It was really easy with FastLED.
Thanks for nice comment.