![]() In order to cut down on the amount of dangling wire, I decided to cut and solder groups of five or six of these together and bring larger 10AWG wire back to the power supplies. The factory was kind enough to include power pigtails that could handle two panels at a time, but that still left lots and lots of wires to deal with. Step one of bringing this display to life was to wire up data and power to each of the 113 panels. I wired and powered up this grid and played around with swapping ribbon cable arrangement around and trying to fix it in MadMapper to make sure this was going to work.Įverything physically looked good so far too- they fit together into a nice flat grid where you couldn't even see the demarcation of the individual panels. Pictured in the second shot are what the power and data wiring for these types of panels look like. ![]() By making this little test grid I was able to verify that I could in fact remap the video on the fly using Modul8 and MadMapper, two pieces of software that are mainly used for VJing and projection mapping. This means that when you make an irregular shape, the panels aren't in a nice straight line like the DVI card expects, so you have to get creative and remap your video to make it display properly. These billboard-type of LED panels are driven by a system that basically takes a DVI input and splits data out data to a number of "receiver cards" that actually drive the panels themselves. Pleasing, and it could be split into two 4'x4' sections which would facilitate cutting it on the Metabeam. So I took to CorelDraw, made a box the size of the LED panel, and started stacking them together until I came up with the above shape. This was a problem I was willing to face. By rotating panels on the edge I could make more of an ovular shape, at the expense of making the mapping a bit more difficult later. With a standard panel size figured out, I knew that I wanted to start with an overall design based on a rectangle for some amount of wiring ease, but then modify the panel layout to create more of a flattened oval to get away from it just looking like a rectangular display. From previous projects I'd learned that as the LED numbers increase into the thousands handling data and power becomes a real pain, so I figured I'd let someone else's technology take care of that instead of reinventing the wheel. From previous projects I had experience with tight pitch LED panels, much as are used on Jumbotron displays or billboards, and I figured these would probably give the best resolution as well as be the easiest things to install and wire up. The first step to even attempting to make this piece was to come up with a design and identify the hardware to be used. What I envision for the much larger piece is about 5x more surface area for the LED array, and a different shape allowing a wooden handmade bridge to cross over the installation, making it more similar to the beautiful Koi ponds and gardens of Japan. This prototype is step one of a much larger project a proof-of-concept to discover and wring out technology and installation limitations before commencing a large-scale immersive environment for the Burning Man Festival. This effect is the basis of my idea for The Koi Pond a stylized LED gazing pool for the enjoyment of Koi fish. This created an interesting illusion in a dark room of these surfaces appearing almost like holes in the wall where you're peering through to the other side. In many of my projection mapping endeavors I've experimented with the idea of the projection surface being a small amount of a much larger area or wall basically projecting onto many small isolated apertures. ![]() For most of my life I've been enthralled with light and lighting, but just recently I've started exploring more video-based techniques involving both projection and large numbers of distributed LED fixtures. ![]()
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