Interactive Light Art (By Chi Chi Kari, Maddy Sinkovic, & Morgan Pence)

For our final project, we chose to create an interactive light art installation.  As an artistic group of individuals, we wanted to combine our knowledge of circuitry with our passion for human-driven artwork.  We drew inspiration from local artists, such as Felipe Prado, in our hometown of Washington, DC.  Over fall break, we all met up in the Washington Harbour and interacted with his piece, the Picto Sender Machine, which consists of a massive low-resolution screen with 1200 large LED pixels that outline the silhouettes of those who stand in front.  This installation served as the main source of inspiration for our project. 

We designed, fabricated, and constructed an interactive sensor box that allows users to create their own LED art piece using a grid of touch sensors. We wanted to give users the ability to interact with a five-by-five panel of sensors corresponding to a screen that contains a grid of Neopixel LED strips.  When a touch sensor is interacted with, 3 colored LEDs within the grid will appear based on which touch sensor was pressed.  Additionally, the user is able to press multiple touch sensors at the same time, to create an entire light show on the screen.

To fabricate the enclosure of our project, we laser-cut an acrylic enclosure with multiple parts.  Our first box was a 13 x 10.25 inch open top box to encase the Arduino Mega, breadboards, and wires.  We used dark blue acrylic to ensure these parts were not visible.  Perpendicular to that box is a 13 x 11 inch closed, white acrylic box that holds 5 rows of Neopixel strips containing 15 LEDs per strip.  Finally, we made 25 touch sensors by hand using conductive copper tape and thin, flexible wire.  We sandwiched these touch sensors between two 13 x 8 inch keyboard panels.  The bottom keyboard panel contains small cut out holes to feed the sensor wires through to the bottom box and was laser-cut using clear acrylic, so we could see through it while wiring.  The top keyboard panel contains larger .8 inch square cut outs that show each touch sensor.  We used black acrylic to create a sleek, polished look.

We had seven send pins that each had four receive pins which were the capacitor sensors. One send pin only had 1 receive pin because we had a total of 25 capacitor sensors. Each send pin and receive pin is connected to the Arduino Mega. We also connected five strips that each contained 15 LEDs to the Mega. Each sensor controls three LED lights. When the capacitor sensor is touched, the sensor value must reach at least 250, which then signals the corresponding lights to illuminate.

• 2 Breadboards
• Arduino Mega 2560 
• Breakout Board
• Wires
• Soldering Iron
• Solder
• Conductive Copper Tape
• 5 WS2812 RGB (or RGBW) Neopixel LED strips
• Acrylic
• Barrel Jack
• 5V power source
• Hot glue
• Hot glue gun

We started this project by working on mock-ups of what we would ideally like our final project to look like. The image above shows our original mock-up. After this, we got working in illustrator and MakerCase to create a base box to hold our Arduino, wiring, and sensors. We also created another box to sit perpendicular to the base box that would hold the LEDs.

In this step, we started creating some of our sensors with conductive copper tape. After creating a few sensors and matching them with LEDs, we build a cardboard prototype so we could visualize how our components would work together.

Using the Illustrator and MakerCase files from step 1, we created a clear enclosure using acrylic and the laser cutter. Using clear acrylic allowed us to visually map our processes and tweak any wiring configurations we saw necessary. This step helped us plan to run the LED wires down the left side of that box to be able to reach the Arduino properly. After this step, we were able to laser-cut what would be our final box with navy and white acrylic.

This was our biggest step by far, assembling all the wiring, soldering our LEDs, breakout board, and connecting all the wires.

We ran the LEDs in 5 layers and had their wires run down the side of the top box.

Above, see our schematics of input and output.

After assembling all of our respective pieces, it was time to test our LEDs and sensors with our code.

Here's a link to our code: here

Now that everything works semi-deconstructed, putting everything together was our final step. To cover the wires connecting the sensor to our board, we painted the clear piece of acrylic to conceal everything.

Here's a video of us demonstrating our project and explaining a little bit about how it works!

Check out a video of our project working here (without narration)!