Some friends formed the band “Kalikut Now“. They asked me to help them creating illuminated letters for a stage show. They made eight 80cm high wooden letters with an acrylic front and did all the hard cabling work, I created the Arduino firmware and the Processing front end. I use a Teensy board, they provide a much better serial latency than the original Arduino boards.
Of course there were a few problems, mainly with the long cable (11 meter) and the SPI signal. You can read more about this on a previous Blog post here and here.
Here’s a picture of one of the numerous night hacking sessions:
The whole Arduino firmware and Processing code is published on my GitHub account. The Processing GUI looks like this:
The software supports 20 color sets, 10 content generators (solid chars, fire, plasma, kaos…), 12 effects (knight rider, strobo…) and 4 different sound reactive modes. The software can be remote controlled by sending OSC messages. We plan to use Ableton Live to send out OSC messages which are processed the Procesing application. If this works, they can define the visuals in Ableton Live, that should simplify the live show.
Here is a quick Showcase of the project:
Oh and by the way, if you need such modules, I sell those in my shop.
And the link to the Soundcloud site of Kalikut Now.
[...] A few of [michu]‘s friends formed a band named Kalikut Now and needed an awesome stage show. The band made a few 80cm-high letters of their band name, cut a few pieces of acrylic, and wired them up with a few LED modules. The work of connecting these letters to a computer and programming them fell on [michu], and we’ve got to say he did a pretty good job. [...]