Animated Light Strip (2008)

Our first apartment had part of a vertical I-beam sticking out of the wall, as an accident or maybe for "indstrial look". In the small gap behind the beam, I wanted to hide lights that would animate and add mood to the adjacent walls.

The Light Strip consists of 128 indvidual purple LED's mounted to acrylic strips and controlled by an arduino compatible microcontroller. The lights are programmed to enter into differend modes over time, all of them visualizing randomness in some way. Some modes showed a progression of random patterns scrolling vertically upwards, some modes simulated falling rain and other modes simulated gravity and rebound as the patterns "bounced" when hitting the ground.

Since I moved with only a backpack full of stuff, the challenge of this project was to be able to build it without access to my tools and shop. I found a local place that cut my smoked acrylic and I was able to use a drill press at a community workshop. There was also an electronics shop within walking distance where I was able to buy a cheap soldering iron and multimeter.

This was also my first microcontroller project and introduction to the arduino programming environment. There's something very satisfying about seeing code running on a physical object. Unfortunately this project got lost shortly after moving countries and the code is also lost.