PROJECTS
During the summer of 2017 I built an over-the-top alarm clock to try to help me wake up in the morning. The display was constructed from LED filaments, which made for a large and excessively bright display. The alarm consisted of an old telephone bell and a boat horn, which could be turned off by flipping a series of switches distributed around my dorm room.
A large sound-reactive LED Lamp I built in the fall of 2017. The lamp was formed by wrapping a string of WS2811 controlled RGB LEDs around a ~5'4" diameter wooden hexagon. The displayed colors are rendered by solving the equations of motion for a string of coupled oscillators. The string is perturbed using real-time readings from a microphone, which allows music and ambient sound to create waves of color along the edge of the lamp.
During the Spring of 2018 I constructed a large RGB LED display with the help of a couple friends. The display is constructed from a number of inexpensive WS2812b LED strips controlled by a custom PIC32MZ microcontroller board. The display was used to display several simple bitmap animations (like Julian Opie's "Suzanne Walking Forwards") as well as some simulations of a mesh of coupled oscillators, which approximates the surface of a liquid and allows for the possibility of real-time sensor inputs to the graphical display in the future. Full documentation of the build can be found here.
This is a Processing sketch that simulates an interactive display made by scanning a row of UV LED pixels up and down a surface painted with strontium aluminate paint. The display plots pixel contrast from a live webcam feed, which emphasizes the edges of objects in the image. If the objects move during the scan, they will smear the image, which leads to interesting effects. The long decay time of the strontium aluiminate phosphor means that the outlines would persist on the display for hours as their brightness fades away. Static objects in the image would become progressively brighter.
The Persistent Colors Mirror is a Processing sketch that displays modified images from a live webcam feed. It displays high contrast pixels as grey scale, while it colors pixels that have a high color velocity (i.e. pixels whose colors are changing rapidly). Once a pixel has been colored, it's brightness decays exponentially with a half-life of a few seconds as its color ascends a color gradient. This is meant to make an interactive display that emphasizes the movements of the subjects without putting much focus on the spatial detail of the subjects.
