My Digital Lavalamp - or "The MkI Epilepsy Generator" - Part 1

A three part series wherein I discuss the problems and solutions I encountered during the production of my own interactive LED lava lamp display:

PHOTOSENSITIVE WARNING: READ BEFORE WATCHING A very small percentage of individuals may experience epileptic seizures when exposed to certain light patterns or flashing lights. Exposure to certain patterns or backgrounds on a computer screen, may induce an epileptic seizure in these individuals. Certain conditions may induce previously undetected epileptic symptoms even in persons who have no history of prior seizures or epilepsy.



However, to get there from here, we'll have to go back a few steps...

Ion
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I saw this product on a friend's desk at work: Ion - A Music Detecting Mood Light - Kickstarter.com and I wanted one.

But the Kickstarter campaign was long over, and the site it spawned to sell them post the campaign had shut down also. There were none on Ebay or anywhere else in stock I could find. I've owned lava lamps over the last 25 years and I really like them and this seemed like a really smart advancement. I was looking for a project that would force me to delve into addressable LEDs so I decided to make my own. What's better than a lava lamp that can be every lava lamp?

I started a massive Evernote file filled with questions about how to build it, what hardware to choose, what functions it could/should have etc. I consulted with friends and pooled ideas about different modes and what they thought might be cool etc. The original Ion lamp was capable of some pretty sublime colours, and also some cool interactive modes too:

I felt like I could see the the individual LEDs themselves and that I could improve on the resolution and offer a wider variety of modes including sound reaction, API connections to favourite services, IFTTT integration, voice recognition and, and ... and... well I'm still adding some of those now it's built.

One thing I haven't tried to replicate is the Ion's bluetooth connection to your phone. That's possible of course, but I had a lot to figure out and had better start with just controlling some lights first huh.

Fadecandy
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I had to make a decision about how to control the LEDs. There are many ways to do this, but which was going to be the easiest and friendliest to my current coding capabilities? Plus, where there any which improved on the somewhat basic RGB output offered by off the shelf Arduino kits?

The answer is indeed yes thanks to Micah Elizabeth Scott and her Fadecandy hardware board. Micah Elizabeth Scott has been crafting displays for annual trips to the Burning Man festival amongst other art installations and interactive experiments. As she shows on her site, most normal LED controllers fall into a trough of sadness when it comes to blending hues together or displaying correct colouring as low light levels. She created the Fadecandy hardware to solve these issues.

She partnered with Adafruit to turn the Fadecandy board into a small and affordable form factor unit that can control a metric crap-tonne of LEDs for really, really big joy-filled displays.

Better yet, it can be controlled via USB from big computers and small, embeddable computers like the Raspberry Pi etc. And it interfaces directly with Processing, which I've already experimented with. Processing is a great platform to program generative art that can accept inputs including music, sound, sensors and other things. It's used by all sorts of creative people for interactive art installations, live music, large scale projections, small embedded pieces etc. Processing is also available for the Raspberry Pi, thus opening the door to my small scale needs.

Get some LEDs
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Where better to get addressable LEDs than Adafruit themselves? Actually... shh, Amazon had the very same lights with waaaay cheaper shipping so after some rough calculations I ordered two 1 metre strips of 60 weatherproof NeoPixel RGB LEDs. I also ordered a 5-volt, 10 amp power switching power supply [to handle NZ's 240v mains power] and one Fadecandy board.

I decided that 8 vertical columns of 15 lights, wrapped around a cylinder should provide a suitable height and LED density to improve upon the Ion lamp resolution. I had to also figure out how to reproduce their diffuser solution as they talked on their page about their prototypes designed to deal with making the individual LEDs blend together into a whole. More on that later.

The first thing to do was to get the Fadecandy board powered and connected to a computer in order to test my LED strips to make sure there were no dead LEDs. They're relatively hardy but sometimes die during shipping.

Success! No dead NeoPixels.

I should mention at this point a note of gratitude to all the people on the internet who have written about their crazy projects and shared advice and tips on how to do stuff like this. This page in particular is excellent and offers a large amount of information for getting started.

Micah offers many example Processing sketches designed to run directly on Fadecandy once you're connected and have the Fadecandy server up and connected. Here's Jamie testing the mouse-driven interaction:

Another example sketch gives you the ability to transform a bitmap through the sample points that are sent to the Fadecandy board and thus onto the LEDS. Here's what a simple bitmap of fire can look like via that method:

It's quite effective. The colours are excellent and the brightness can be overwhelming at times. This is a powerful way to manipulate the light array that means you don't have to be an expert programmer, you can envision cool effects just using things you can make in Photoshop.

You can see the weird-ass bitmap I made in this example scrolling through the array sample points. These were meant to look like mini nukes.

With these simple examples working, and the creative power clearly accessible, it was time to form the complete array that will end up wrapping around the central cylinder in my lamp.

As detailed in the Adafruit NeoPixel Curtain example I spent some time mapping and designing the separation between the power requirements of the array and it's data inputs. Each Fadecandy board offers 8 data outputs that can drive 64 NeoPixel LEDs each. I planned to drive 120 LEDs split into two strips. It was easy enough to simply drive each strip with a channel from the Fadecandy and not be too concerned that I wasn't using all the bandwidth of each channel. This did make for some funky OPC mapping that we'll get to soon.

The next step involved soldering, which I can do but have never been great at. Nothing better than a reason to practise.

Here's the array layout with my hand drawn power and data connections. You can see the arrows indicating the direction of the serial data that tells each LED what colour to display. I had to wire and solder all the missing parts at the end to complete the flow:

Enter the Vase
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I should mention at this point that I'd decided on the length of the strips according to the final form I intended to deploy the strips into. I wanted to mimic the Ion lamp styling and presumptuously assumed a local homeware shop [Briscoes] would simply have cylindrical glass vases that might suit the task. They did! Here's a pic of the vase, upside down on a temporary wooden plate with a central core of PVC tube from the hardware shop:

My plan was to complete the wiring with the array laid out flat, then transfer it to the PVC tube and resolve the rest of the wiring loom issues as I went. I also gambled on being able to solve the diffuser issue down the line too as I could simply remove the vase and line it with some acrylic later once the array was working correctly. I still had no concept of the final installed form at this point, much less what small single board computer to run it off. I thought who cares if I only ever have it running connected to my computer while I'm dorking about?

After a busy few hours of soldering and insulating, I had the strips connected and ready to test. Although a few of my solder joins failed [embarrassedFace.jpg] thankfully I'd not made any short circuits and my array successfully lit up.

Having got this far, I could not resist testing some more complicated array graphics and modes.

Yeah I know, my desk is a mess.

I quickly ran into some issues to do with how I'd chosen to lay out my array and how the Fadecandy board and Processing saw things working out.

Radians, and assumptions
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As any Fadecandy enthusiast will know, a visit to the Fadecandy google group page will show that multiple people want to layout their LED arrays in different and sometimes challenging ways.

I'd made the assumption during my wiring stage that my horizontal layout could simply be rotated in the Processing sketch or OPC layer to be vertically oriented and wrapped around a cylinder. Here's an example of the indexing of the zigzag array I'd followed [this example matches an 8x8 NeoPixel grid but the result is similar for a 15x8 grid - just longer on one side]:

You can see that the data input for the array enters on the top left at the 0 index, continues along the top to the right end where it zigs [or zags?] down onto the next row, this time in reverse order to the left hand end and then zigs again onto the next row, this time in the correct order etc. And on until the end of the layout.

It's vitally important that the Fadecandy understands the intention of this layout so that it knows how to take the sample points in the processing sketch and convert the resulting pixel colour information into the correct spatial information when it's sent in serial down the data pin connection of the LED strip.

My problem was that I actually required a layout more like the following image and that, being the VFX artist I am, I could simply specify a 90 degree rotation to achieve the correct result:

I needed this layout so that all my input power and data wiring would be near the bottom of the layout and that the longest dimension [not represented properly here] would be vertical, to match the height of my lava lamp physical orientation once the array was wrapped around the PVC cylinder.

Although I had success with running sketches on the array as I'd wired it horizontally, if I simply rotated my LEDs 90 degrees it meant that a graphic element running in the Processing sketch from top left to top right would run from bottom left to top left on the array. Gadzooks. This throws a spanner in the works of some of my ideas for things based on physics, like sketches that use a gravity direction meant to mimic the real world.

I had no clear place in the Processing sketch to rotate the output, and it was not immediately obvious where else I could effect this?

It's beautiful. But it's horizontal. This will not do.

After some forum diving and Fadecandy google group spelunking, I hit on this thread in particular about a person who had a non-standard NeoPixel layout who needed to perform a similar rotation-based remapping operation. They used a rotation value specified in radians to get the correct orientation in conjunction with some other value swapping kung-fu.

If you get on down to building a Fadecandy project yourself you're going to run into the problem of which OPC library call to use to map your Processing sketch out to your array. I settled on using two opc.ledGrid calls, the syntax for which looks like the following:

opc.ledGrid( index, stripLength, numStrips, x, y, ledSpacing, stripSpacing, angle, zigzag, flip )

After some head scratching and monkeying around, I successfully remapped my sketch layouts out to my array via the two Fadecandy channels I was using with the following commands:

opc.ledGrid( 0, 15, 4, width*0.25, height/2, height/15, width/8, 4.712, true )
opc.ledGrid( 64, 15, 4, width*0.75, height/2, height/15, width/8, 4.712, true )

I've highlighted in the lines above the radian specification for the rotation required. This worked! And it now gave me sketch output in Processing that was oriented correctly for the cylinder arrangement.

Success! Now I can move onto the physical installation, knowing that gravity points down. Duh.

With this problem solved I was pretty certain that I could progress onto the next stages of the design - the physical form factor, and also start considering some other issues like, how can I add a button to the front of the lamp to change the sketch? What small computer could it run on?

While I considered those things, I also spent some time making sketches in Processing to run on the array and experimented with designs from https://www.openprocessing.org where a great many people share their ideas with the world. The terms at OpenProcessing.org specify that any work uploaded or created on their site falls under a Creative Commons license unless specified otherwise. I've found many sketches there that simply run in Processing locally quite well. They require tuning and optimising to run on the lava lamp array but this is quite fun.

So, that's it for Part 1. In Part 2 I'll discuss the computer platform choice and show the housing construction. In Part 3 I'll detail the steps and software I created to deploy what I'd built into a standalone unit with wifi where I can add new modes wirelessly. And a stretch goal...

Part 2 this way...

-j