This Maker covered his swimming pool with Rainbowduino-powered LEDs to create one heck of a dance floor.
Like something straight out of Saturday Night Fever, Loren Bufanu has managed to transform his swimming pool into an LED-laden dance floor. And from the looks of its surrounding environment filled with garnished chairs and tables, it would appear to be for a wedding or party of some sort.
To accomplish this feat, the Maker covered the pool with several glass panels, each outfitted with LEDs. Inspired by the Lampduino on Instructables, the project required nearly 450 meters of RGB LED strips controlled by two Rainbowduinos (ATmega328), driven by 64 power MOSFETs, 64 transistors, 64 bipolar transistors, a few capacitors and some resistors. Producing white light from the LEDs drew 8A from the power supply.
Although he originally thought to use the Colorduino as embedded in the Lampduino, he was unable to find a way to connect two of the boards together and control them with the same interface. So instead, he turned to a pair of Rainbowduino v3.0, which are pin compatible with the Colorduinos and can communicate over I2C. For those unfamiliar with these boards from Seeed Studio, the Arduino-compatible MCU features two MY9221 chips, which are capable of handling 12 channels of Adaptive Pulse Density Modulation.
In terms of software, the Maker used Pixel Invaders. Unfortunately, this portion of the project didn’t come as easy as the hardware installation. Bufanu had wanted the lights to flash in sync with some tunes, but a few setbacks in program didn’t allow for this to work. In the end, he decided to employ some simple visualization software combined with the Pixel Invaders “Screen Capture” mode. Fortunately, that did the trick.
“Basically, MilkDrop-like software is displaying some colors on the screen, and Pixel Invaders capture the screen, controlling the two Raibowduino after that pattern. Both are started by a simple batch file located on the desktop of the controlling PC. It was a ‘ugly hack’ but it is doing the job great,” Bufanu explains.
Intrigued? Head over to the Maker’s original page here, or simply see it in action below.
[h/t Hackaday]
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