Festival Dance Floor Installation Thingy

If you're job involves looking at a screen all day, but you want to look at (at least some) real life things during your life, a good starting point is to not design things in CAD but build real models instead. Another advantage of this method is that the visual effect of the installation can be estimated and optimized much better, at least for artistic works. This it the first scale model I build. Thanks a lot to Anne (see vermi.studio) for painting the floor like grass that has been flattened and faded by the dancing crowd.

Unfortunately at some point you need to get back to the screen, since the easiest way to get the cutting pattern for the cloths is to just redo everything in CAD and export the drawings.

And it also looks nice in CAD I guess

The sails are made from Jersey like tissue that is cut into triangles. The spline-like curved shape comes purely from the stretch of the tissue (what even works better is Lycra or other stretchy tissues). At each corner of the triangular sails 40 cm long flat cords are attached by sewing. The cords are color-coded so its easier to set the thing up. One important consideration to make is, whether you plan to use the installation for your cats birthday party or for a commercial festival. Most festivals have some regulations regarding the fire protection class of whatever you build there, especially when it comes to tissue. So please check the regulations before ordering any materials. In most cases it needs to be certified with some fire protection class.

That's how it looks in full scale at night (@ Golden Age Festival)

View from the forest

Some people on the dance floor for scale

With Camelopardalis-like pattern projection instead of the LED spots and mirrors also looks nice (@ Antamauna Floor at Camp Tipsy 2024)

Top Hub, and you can also see the circular mirrors at the edges

And how it looks at daytime

It's also possible to mount the sails on trees if there are any, then you even don't need to set up the poles (@ Keine Menschen Sägen 2022)

If you want to download the FreeCAD model, here's the link: X-TODO-X

Classical Psytrance String Art

I build those a long time ago back in 2004 so sorry for the bad resolution. One important recommendation if you want to build some of these or any deco stuff in general. Don't build large 3D-Objects as the stars on the images. Sure, they really look nice, but they take up a lot of space, and if you need to get a lot of stuff to the event, then having some mechanism to compactify your stuff is really critical (unless you have big trucks available)

Minor planets game

The game is a collaboration with Anne. It works like this: there are 12 minor planets. If you press the big red start button two of them start to glow in the same color. Now you have to connect them by touching both - or if they are too far away from each other by daisy-chaining several fellow-humans as the conductor. If you manage to do so before the timeout, the next level starts. Later on in the game it's not just two, but also more planets that need to be connected. The timeout also gets shorter. The minor planets are made of acrylic spheres and where painted by vermi.studio

Here you can see all the components including the start button as well as the control unit

The game at a festival together with the large planets (also made by vermi.studio)

If you want to bulild your own, here is the source code: Arduino Source Code

The wiring is pretty straightforward. Inside the minor planets there are short WS2812 LED strips (10 LEDs per sphere). They are connected to form two 60 LED strips. The spheres are connected with a 5-core cable where the pins are: Touch, GND , LED-Data-Out, +5V, LED-Data-in (make sure to place the GND / 5V lines in between to shield the Touch and Data lines from each other) Also if the cables get to long (5M seems to be the limit for me) an additional "repeater LED" located at the control unit in between each two strips may be a good idea. The Touch-Wires all have a 1M pulldown resitor soldered to them. One issue is moisture ar the connectors. Make sure to isolate them with some hotglue or something. Also if you need more details on the wiring or something please let me know.