@Jason_Coon pointed out that I hadn’t shared this with you all yet. So here we go.
This is the Burning Man project we took along last year. Some of you may remember I was asking about power requirements and FadeCandy last July. We ended up using a Raspberry Pi and a FadeCandy to drive the LEDs, and I have to say I really like FadeCandy, the transitions are just so effortlessly smooth thanks to its built in color fading.
The reason it was called Zen Ball is a whole other long story I won’t go into here, but you can check it out and a whole load of constructions pics here: http://delarre.net/posts/burningman-2015-zenball/
Sadly we’re not going to Burning Man this year, so I have a year off from mammoth projects, but I’m hoping to come back with something ridiculous next time http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLQ7OkuG0t8
Since we were building it to have a big mechanism inside to drag 10lb steel balls around the table top using 300lb pull force magnets a 2 stepper motors inside driving massive wooden gears it was all a little over designed. Unfortunately the mechanism didn’t work quite as hoped and I’ve yet to work up the enthusiasm to put the time into it to make it work again. So I could probably have used half the wood and half the effort to achieve the same result. Good quality Baltic Birch plywood is expensive!
Its 1m in diameter, the table top is at about 45cm from the ground, there’s a set of 6 legs underneath siting on a base thats around 80cm in diameter. It was built to almost exactly fit into the back of our Honda CRV while in pieces.
