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Lights
12 years ago
For a change, let's make animals jealous... my dog sure loves anything glittering, dancing lights and laser spots. Ha. Nature has endowed very few creatures with lights.
Errol carries quite a few... about 60 or so. I wanted the lights to glitter in time to the sound nearby and in many colours and patterns. Errol hears sounds from his horns and his tail... the computers in each talk to one another and are supposed to decide which lights to illuminate. I needed the lights to compensate for the ambient brightness, so there's also light sensors in the head and tail. Well, its quite something to play with on the dance floor- I love watching the patterns of lights in the wings. I can't really see the others- the tail end, ridges and horns.
My biggest problem is the huge difference from loud to quiet! Something we can do so easily- crazy complex in hardware and computer code. Somehow you have to average out the levels and pick out the patterns. When the music is really loud, I'm just resigned to have the lights on continuous.
Most of the lights I use are off the shelf Xmas lights, Dollar Store fibre optic strands, Princess Auto EL wire kits and IKEA light strips. (ie, cheap) The cool thing is, with a little fooling around, they all can work from batteries and many types already have electronics that flash them or change the colours. A lot of these lights are absolutely tiny. OK, they do break rather a lot, so there's a lot of fixing...
But out there on the 'net are amazing multicoloured strips ready for computer communications (which I have seen in some Xmas light displays) Sadly, this goes beyond Errol's poor overcoded microcomputers.
EL wire is a bit more common these days, but power hungry, tough to cut to size and hard to control. I have a few of them in the wings.
And then the ultimate- fabrics with built in lights! (some with TV resolution) Drawback? Yup, expensive.
Ah, the fun I'm having!
Errol carries quite a few... about 60 or so. I wanted the lights to glitter in time to the sound nearby and in many colours and patterns. Errol hears sounds from his horns and his tail... the computers in each talk to one another and are supposed to decide which lights to illuminate. I needed the lights to compensate for the ambient brightness, so there's also light sensors in the head and tail. Well, its quite something to play with on the dance floor- I love watching the patterns of lights in the wings. I can't really see the others- the tail end, ridges and horns.
My biggest problem is the huge difference from loud to quiet! Something we can do so easily- crazy complex in hardware and computer code. Somehow you have to average out the levels and pick out the patterns. When the music is really loud, I'm just resigned to have the lights on continuous.
Most of the lights I use are off the shelf Xmas lights, Dollar Store fibre optic strands, Princess Auto EL wire kits and IKEA light strips. (ie, cheap) The cool thing is, with a little fooling around, they all can work from batteries and many types already have electronics that flash them or change the colours. A lot of these lights are absolutely tiny. OK, they do break rather a lot, so there's a lot of fixing...
But out there on the 'net are amazing multicoloured strips ready for computer communications (which I have seen in some Xmas light displays) Sadly, this goes beyond Errol's poor overcoded microcomputers.
EL wire is a bit more common these days, but power hungry, tough to cut to size and hard to control. I have a few of them in the wings.
And then the ultimate- fabrics with built in lights! (some with TV resolution) Drawback? Yup, expensive.
Ah, the fun I'm having!
