Draw your Light
You can draw your own pyramid lights patterns using your hands. There are two triangular shapes one has 9 pyramids with different heights and another has small 9 triangles. When you though each triangles, 9 pyramids will react and draw lights. Your touch make lights up with warm emotion. Inspired by all nature especially tree, the wood boxes represented the land and 9 pyramids are trees. Your touch would be sun and the sun makes trees apply fertiliser. In general, an artefact is colder than nature such as LED and solid is much colder than natural light and wood. ‘Draw your Light’ intends to break this norm and combine nature with artefacts. Wood and your hand are nature temper besides pyramids and electronic devices could be artificial object. Thus, in this project, let people participate in the work, they feel connected to project and share their warm tempers to project.
Technical Details
For two triangular boxes are made of 3t woods, designed via Adobe illustrator and printed out with laser cutter. One size of big triangle is 250mm and small one is 150mm. And the heights are 56mm and 36mm each. The pyramids is 1mm banding acrylics and the heights are 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120 and 130. Also, using laser cutter to print out and in the surface, I put dichotic films to make fancy lights and shadows. For electronics, the main chip is MPR121 from Adafruit to make 9 pins for touch sensitive buttons. This MPR121 is connected to Arduino pins(IRQ->digital write pin 2, SDA->A5, SCL->A4 and VIN->3v). I used MPR121 open source codes in https://github.com/sparkfun/MPR121_Capacitive_Touch_Breakout and modified it. For the schematic, 9 LEDs are connected with digital Pin 3 to 11 and ground with 270ohm resisters.
Process
Drawing my draft design by my hand.
Making prototypes with cardboard and cover of plastic files(for pyramids, I realised plastic files could be a great material for pyramids), designed by illustrator
Test for electronic parts with mpr121 chip
Print out real piece with wood and sanding to fit in, also print out pyramids and engraved little bit to band
Attach dichroic film to acrylics with spray glue and loctite
Painting wood to white colour
Connect wood to leds and pyramids then soldering
Print out with laser cutter for small input
Making touch pads with aluminium foil
Stick multi wire on aluminium foil
Connect multi wire to mpr121 touch sensor
Join the input to the output by putting wires to Arduino
