LED Poles
Here’s how I made four LED poles for a recent art performance here in New York City.
Requirements
The project brief, as it was pitched to me, was to create four tall uprights for the corners of an eight-foot by eight-foot raft. They needed to be quick to deploy and start up the animation on their own after a five-minute countdown timer. And just in case anything were to fail, the show must go on without human intervention, so they needed to have as much redundancy as possible built into the design. So I came up with a set of four independent circuits, one on each pole, each containing a strip of pixels that will go up the pole and then over to the top of its neighbor, with some slack to drape in between the uprights. It’s like an LED huppah. Oh, and I had one week before the show to build everything, so this is a speed project.
Supplies
Also available as a DigiKey wishlist.
- 4x reels of WS2812b LED strip
- 4x ½” electrical conduit
- 4x USB batteries at least 5000mAh capacity
- 4x USB cables
- 4x microcontrollers with 5V operating voltage such as Pro Trinket
- 4x capacitors, each 500uF-1000uF 6.3V+
- 4x 300-500 ohm resistors
- Electrical tape
- Zip ties
- Wire
- Soldering tools and supplies
- Soldering iron
- Solder
- Wire strippers
- Flush cutters
- Pliers or tweezers
- Eye protection
- Workholding tool (often called a third hand)
- Multimeter
- Heat shrink tubing
- Heat gun (or a lighter)
- Solder wick or a desoldering pump for fixing mistakes
- Paracord