What was supposed to be a project with 48 led-strips consisting of 14,400 led’s controlled by 14 Teensy’s ended up being around 38 strips 9300 led’s and 8 teensy’s due to scaling issues and time constraints. Considering that this is my first project with fast-led and something of this scope i’m happy with the results.
Its called Trees of Life and allowed visitors to connect with the 2 trees shown in the video and bring them to life by working together with other visitors.
@Ken_White Thanks!
Regarding the code: Its currently on a private git server, I’m planning on cleaning up some stuff this week after which I’ll upload it to GitHub(Its become a bit messy as we had to fight deadlines haha.) I’ll share it here once its online if you’re interested.
The architecture of our final product consisted of 1 master teensy and 3 slave teensy’s, the master reads input from 6 ultrasonic sensors and handles the states of the 3 slaves. Each slave controls 2 hands and 4-8 led-strips.
Regarding the interaction, each tree is a separate system.
It has 6 hands and 12 ‘arteries’(LED-Strips) 2 out of each hand. These start at 1m50 and go 5 - 7,5m high.
Basically when untouched the tree and its arteries are in a restful idle animation. Users however were able to wake up the tree by placing their hands on the hands of the tree, when this happens the 2 arteries connected to the corresponding hand will start pulsating with ‘energy’.
The amount of energy actually varied based upon the distance of the users hand in regards to the tree’s hand. Brightest when fully touched, and dimmest at a range of 5cm. (The hands contained ultrasonic sensors) Unfortunately however this feature went by unnoticed for most people and the ultrasonic sensors proved to be quite fragile.
Take into account that each hand is handled separately and that the pulsation of energy through the arteries of different hands does not happen at the same time. When 4 or more hands are registered the pulsation starts synchronising over time which gives a nice effect when complete. Once complete for 5 seconds the tree has fully been ‘awakened’ by the user after which the full tree pulses in an animation resembling a heartbeat.
There is also the possibility that users walk away when the tree is ‘synchronising’, if this happens all the energy that normally pulses upwards flows downwards after which the tree is reset.
@Mike_Clifford It was crazy, especially when you take into account that up until this project my projects barely taxed a single power supply unit, let alone 12. Luckily we had a sponsor from the led industry that gave us advice on this part.