Category Archives: wow suit

White Night 2016 – The Wow Suit

White Night 2016 in Melbourne may not have been as huge as in previous years, but I sure had a blast. I walked around the Melbourne CBD and surrounds for about 7 hours and got my photo taken by A LOT of people! Everyone I ran into seemed to enjoy themselves and really liked the Wow Suit. Here are a few pics from the evening

I had a friend shoot some really good video of the suit, but until I get my hands on it, here is some from my Instagram:

Notice how the Official White Night Instagram account tells me to apply for an art grant next year, even though they sent me a Generic “NO THANKYOU” when I applied for this years event.

One more:

The Wow Suit @whitenightmelb !! #whitenightmelb2016 #whitenight #whitenightmelbourne #whitenightmelb

A video posted by Elec Dash Tron Dot Org (@wow_elec_tron) on

Something new, something BIG!

Work has begun on a marvelous LED Installation for the Maitreya Festival. The project, titled “Space Theatre” will comprise of a huge “planet vs black hole ” diorama !

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Some goodies for the installation above! We are using over 2000 APA102 Pixels, driven by a Raspberry Pi A+. This installation will be built on the backbones of the same tech used int the Wow Suit.

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Here they are fully built and tested! Now onto building the LED layout map…

MOFO 2016 – Electric Light Yoga & Faux Mo

This year, I was chosen to work with a talented costume designer Sabrina Evans, to create 10 LED covered suits for MOFO 2016 the summer arts festival held by MONA in Hobart Tasmania. The results were amazing

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One of the suits was used in an awesome arty yoga session, also held at MONA, called Electric Light Yoga. Above is one the shots. Here is the suit from behind…

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Noodles of cabling! The rest of the suits were used by actors at the Faux Mo nightclub event on Saturday. They roamed around the huge art filled space, created by Jamin Kluss for MOFO. The make shift nightclub was built inside 12 Murray Street, Hobart. The ex government building is to be demolished shortly and was well utilized.

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But nothing is without complications. The box containing the battery modules for all the suits was shipped down to Hobart using Fastaway couriers(don’t use them). They advised a 3 day shipping schedule, its been 6 days and the box hasn’t arrived yet. I had to repurchase all the battery modules in Hobart at an exorbitant price

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Here they are charging the night before the main event, at our Airbnb that we rented in Battery Point, Hobart(no pun intended).

Check out my Instagram for some short Videos of all the Shenanigans

A new project for MOFO 2016

I have been commissioned to create 10 LED suits for Faux Mo as part of MOFO the Summer Arts festival in Hobart, Tasmania. The webbing of the suits was built by Sabrina Evans, an awesome costume designer form Hobart. The webbing is made of nylon and clips on to the person.

Not yet sure what will be done with all 10 suits, but here are a few demo shots of them in action on my model:

Some mad disco patterns

A few other samples:

Each suit is powered by a 20,000mAh 5V Battery module. The Strips are APA102 and controlled by a NodeMCU/ESP8266 Micro Controller.

Wow Suit Gen 3 – Up and Running

Problems listen in the previous entry have been resolved. It seems that I can not push the APA102 strips to run above 5MHz using the Raspberry Pi’s SPI port. That seems to be the maximum before I get noise on the line. 6MHz works as well but you can see some noise on the very end of the block when allot of power is consumed. I think it is a combination of things. but im happy with 5MHZ

 

 

The other issue was the Power Up drain. For now the best forward is to put hardware switches onto each power tap. There are 11 power taps. Ill assign 7 switches on a small perf board that joins all the taps together to the 6 USB power cables. If i start up the sequence sequentially, the LEDs have 0 noise and power on in the OFF state, which is what we want! If i power up all the taps at once, i get a huge whopping bunch of noise and the batteries cut out to protect themselves from overload.

Wow Suit 3rd Generation Production Update

Here is one of the panels that goes onto the arms for the 3rd Gen Wow Suit


Each arm will have 2 of these. I decided to make different sized panels for each body part. Makes it more interesting to look at. The panels are all very tightly packed with APA102 LED Pixels and so far have been working very well. Its taking me about 1-2 hours to prep each panel. I’m being super meticulous and testing each panel through each stage of construction.

Wow Suit V3 – Production Update

Still no word form White Night Melbourne about funding. It would be great to know if they accepted/rejected my idea. I’m leaning to rejected and proceeding none the less.

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Above are all the LED panels. You can see the upper right led panel completed with 255 APA102 LEDs. The other panels are currently empty until all the LEDs arrive.

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Each panel is composed of a soft felt sheet attached to a firm clear plastic sheet. The LEDs are attached to the plastic side, connected, tested and then all the wires are sealed with felt for cosmetic appeal. I plan on using large velcro pads to attach each panel to the fabric suit.

New Panel Layout for the V3 Wow Suit

Here are 2 video demo of the new panel layout:

This one runs a simple pixel pusher to test each pixels colour and location:

This one runs part of the Wow Suits full software rendering suite:

Each panel consists of 255 APA102 LED Pixels. There will be a total of 12 of these panels, however the panels on the arms and body may be smaller.

Wow Suit V 3 – Production Update

I have used up the last of my APA102 strips from my previous order to make the 1st prototype panel for the 3rd Iteration of the Wow Suit.

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This is the panel for the bottom right leg. With this prototype i have 17 strips x 15 Pixels Per Strip totaling at 255 LEDs for one panel. The previous iteration of the Wow Suit had 10 x 16 pixel strips, which were 160 Pixels per block).

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I’m trying to get them as tightly packed as possible. The base block is a piece of felt secured to a thin piece of plastic sheet. Its both rigid and flexible enough to adhere to the cat suit Ill be putting this on to.

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I have also added a pixel inside the RPI casing as the driver Pixel. This pixel is directly connected to the SPI bus on the RPI and is driven by the RPI’s 3.3v Power Supply. Its the best way to get a reliable signal at very high SPI speeds. I’m essentially using the pixel as a voltage level converter. When driving LEDs, the software ignores pixel 0 and sends a blank pixel to it each render.

The Wow Suit V3 – Building has begun

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Above is the brains of the Wow Suit. The Raspberry Pi A+. I have 2, one is a backup in case I step on the 1st :)  For $50 you cant really pass up on this power house. The RPI runs the following stack of software:

I have also placed an order for a body suit, and will be building the 1st panel in the coming days to test out a new layout . Also in the pipeline is 20 Meters of APA102 144ppm LED Strips.