LEDs

I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2023. The camp I joined had begun an impressive LED light installation the year prior and were hoping to improve upon it.

With my help, we arrived at a dense 10,000+ LED ceiling grid with beautiful animations powered by a Raspberry Pi. All LED pixels are individually addressable with custom diffuse tubing for smooth, bright, gorgeous colors.

I learned LX Studio / Chromatik (a.k.a. the Ableton Live of light) and wrote almost all the java code powering the animations. Wanting to evangelize and crowd-source, I built reusable components (e.g. modulators tied to the beat of music) that any campmate could use to create new patterns with a UI. I also ported the Pixelblaze universe to run on our system, giving us access to even more patterns.

I'm most proud of the audio reactive capability I built, especially realtime beat detection and syncing using the amazing python music ML library Librosa. Here's a video demonstrating, as well as the Jupyter notebook I wrote for prototyping, full code here.

I even wrote a custom webapp to control it over wifi from our phones. The overall effect was truly stunning, and we were so happy (and proud) to be contributing to the art there.