Gizmosmith

LED Art

An LED cube light that I made for my girlfriend’s birthday. It has four (or maybe five, I forget) color modes, each inspired by one of the classical elements (fire, water, earth, air).

Little LED cubes, in with some solid black cube boxes. These ones just shifted colors.

Color box, front view. It has 256 slow-shifting RGB LEDs in it.

Working on the trim for the color box.

Because of the way the LEDs are built, the red, green and blue light exits the LED in slightly different directions, leading to some interesting lighting effects.

Internal view, showing the LEDs.

A variety of test images. When the box starts up, the LEDs are all synchronized, but they drift out of synch fairly quickly.

Cnidaria Hallucengenia, a set of 5-6 glowing jellyfish. I had planned to have them include audio playback and recording, so that they would “hear” each other and create a soundscape of chopped up noise that would eventually approximate the white noise of the ocean. That didn’t work because the mics on them were not sensitive enough, but the flowing and glowing was plenty appealing to people anyway.

They’re made out of umbrellas, scrap optical fiber, and garbage bags. LOL I’m an Alchemist.

R, G, and B tests. The code doesn’t usually put them in these modes, and makes secondary colors instead.

Installed in a weird sort of closet/storage space at MIT’s Hacking Arts event.

Installed at Boston’s Burning Man Decompression Party in… 2011? It’s been a while.

Virus/Icosahedron light for the Seizuredome. It had a bunch of modes, but the main one was strobing on and off at a rate that causes visual hallucinations. The spikes are there so that when it’s sitting on a surface, it’s not resting on one of the LEDs. Also, they look mean as hell. I took this thing out on a rope and swung it around like a mace while it was running.

Testing in my kitchen. 20 Watts of LED POWAH!

Benchtop testing in a mode that wasn’t terribly blinding. The LEDs could be faded and dimmed under Arduino control.

The light was installed in an icosahedral dome wrapped in mylar, so that everything was blinking red. It was pretty intense when it was running, especially at night.

My friend Jenna gave me this old window, which I stuck LED tape on and hung on the wall. It produces enough light to light up a room, albeit dimly, and casts rainbow shadows around everything.

Thee Deth of Pigs has a flickering LED effect in the eyes. It looks pretty eerie.

Security camera enclosures converted into red LED spotlights. These were mounted as trail lights at a festival, but for maximum trollishness, they pointed directly down the trail. Walking towards them was pretty unpleasant.