Intro
The Herzeleid LED Wall was a projected I created for my Senior Thesis class at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Even though my course was Motion Media Design, I did not want to just create a piece of motion graphics like all my peers, I wanted to use technology to create a device that could display motion through light. After doing some reasearch, I stumbled uppon some documentation written by Aidan Lincoln Fowler, who had built a project simmilar to what I was aiming to do. I then followed his article to attempt to create my own DIY LED Wall
Proccess
Basically there are two main "fronts" that make this project work, the power and the data. First, when it came to sending power to the LED strips, I had to use a few terminal blocks connected to the main power supply. The terminal blocks had wires soldered to the beginning of every every 60 LEDs. According to Fowler's article, after 60 LEDs, power drop may occur. When it comes to data, my goal was to make my LEDs react to audio, so here's the sequence of data processing:
MP3 file -> Touchdesigner to process the audio and create graphics based on it (see image below) -> Syphon the TD file to Madmapper -> DMX mapping to Teensy + Octo Shield (microcontroller) -> WS2812B Adressable LED Strips
Final Product
Conclusion
This project was a lot of fun. It really opened many doors for me when it comes to building my own devices to create interactive installations. It represents everything that I love, the connection between art and technology! I really hope to be able to keep doing this type of work in the future, and keep learning about the incredible world of microcontrollers!
Also, I wanted to thank Aidan Fowler for making his knowledge about LEDs and Madmapper public. I would not be able to create this project if i wasn't for him. Here's a link for the original article: