We were contacted by Josiah Wolf of MYCincinnati to help with a project for a performance in the Price Hill Creative Community Festival. He wanted to use LED strips to show and animate planetary orbits. Here’s a video of how things turned out:

My role in things was to design the electrical side of things, do the necessary programming, and make the system customizable and easy to use enough so that Josiah could quickly get it to where he needed it and focus on other aspects of the performance. Everything was done remotely which presents some debugging challenges but we were able to work together efficiently over phone and email to get everything working.

Here’s a video of an initial electrical design validation prototype running:

Here are some videos of Josiah’s team rigging and wiring the installation:

Here’s the initial test run before ironing everything out:

Here’s the MYCincinnati Cosmic Ensemble practicing:

To allow for easy yet robust connection of the LED strips and to allow for an SD card to configure settings without code updates I chose to use a Teensy 3.6 and an OctoWS2811 Adapter. Here are some pictures of how we attached the boards together using standard male pin header:

A couple rigging pics:

Pictures of the final installation running:

Feel free to reach out if you have an art project you need electrical help with or a Snoezelen or sensory room you want built or enhanced.