Fountain of Light Installation
Over 6ft tall electronic sculpture which responds to the audience's distance from the sculpture. Completed in collaboration with classmates for EE27N: Electronics Rocks.
I was involved in making 3D models in SolidWorks, writing code for Arduinos, and building the hardware (wood, acrylic tubes, LED light strips, 3D printing, steel, etc.)
Fountain of Light Installation
Over 6ft tall electronic sculpture which responds to the audience's distance from the sculpture. Completed in collaboration with classmates for EE27N: Electronics Rocks.
I was involved in making 3D models in SolidWorks, writing code for Arduinos, and building the hardware (wood, acrylic tubes, LED light strips, 3D printing, steel, etc.)
September - December 2015
Team Project at Stanford
About The Project:
Technology & Mediums:
This is a roughly 6 foot tall electronic fountain sculpture completed by my group in the Stanford class EE27N: Electronics Rocks. Electronics Rocks was a freshman seminar I took where the 16 freshman in the class collaborated on a ten week electrical engineering based project.
The fountain is capable of showing a variety of light patterns, and has infra-red sensors in the base that allow the audience to interact with it.
I contributed both to the part of the group working on building the structure and the part working on the software, so I often ended up facilitating compromises between the two groups' plans.
Technology & Mediums:
September - December 2015
PROCESS:
INSPIRATION & INITIAL DESIGN
Our initial inspiration was the tradition of "Fountain Hopping" at Stanford. Stanford has many fountains and on hot days it's common for groups of students to go from fountain to fountain and play in them. However, during our freshman year the fountains were all turned off to conserve water so we wanted to created a large scale art piece that multiple people could interact with as a more sustainable version of fountain hopping.
We realized that LED strings could be used to imitate the flow of water and started brainstorming structures that could use LED strings to make an "electronic fountain." Above is one concept design I drew of a fountain that would be reminiscent of water crashing on a rock, which was incorporated into our final design.
HARDWARE
We used seven acrylic tubes with a Illusion Film, a material used to fog windows, in them to house the LED strings. The tubes were supported by a wooden base that could house all the electronics. The wooden base splits into 6 pieces so the fountain can easily be moved.
I contributed to building the base, setting up the tubes, and, as I was also one of the people experimenting with the Arduinos used to control the LED strings, helped ensure the hardware and software would mesh well together.
ELECTRONICS
We used an Arduino UNO and a Teensy to control seven LED strips. To make synchronization easy we ran all seven LED strips through one Teensy instead of using multiple. In order to make the LED strips run properly, we increased the Teensy's output voltage from 3.3V to the 5V using level switcher circuits and 2 buffer chips.
SOFTWARE
We initially used the FastLED library to get functions that can control the LED strips so we could design algorithms to make the LED strips imitate water. However, using just an Arduino with the FastLED library turned out to lag when controlling all seven LED strips we were using at the same time so we added a library called OctoWS2811 that is optimized for the Teensy (essentially a more powerful Arduino) and altered our algorithm to use one array of pixels instead of a two dimensional one. By using OctoWS2811 in combination with FastLED we were able to successfully make the LED strips have our desired behavior.
After we had the LED strips working we also added infrared sensors to the base of the fountain so users could interact with it. We used a library call RunningMedian to smooth out its readings.
My contribution to this part of the project was being one of the many people who experimented with various libraries and algorithms in order to create interesting patterns with the LED strips.
3D PRINTING THE TUBE CAP
Over the course of a couple days I also modeled in SolidWorks and 3D printed caps for the tubes. The challenge of creating the caps was that they needed to be able to hold the LED strips taut without bending the strips too severely. The caps fit snugly into the tubes and have a removable lid that snap fits into the top. The caps were made so the LED strips could be removed from the tube without unplugging them from the electronics
DISPLAYING
At the end of the quarter we finished the project and were able to display it in the Electrical Engineering building at Stanford. Because the fountain could be taken apart and rebuilt relatively easily, we also displayed the project in a few dormitories at Stanford.