The first project idea, ‘Ripple LEDs’, that came into my mind was programming a LED array so that it behaves as a simulated water surface. For example, touching of the the LEDs would create a ripple effect that will eventually die down while stroking a line of LEDs would produce spreading trails of ripples as in the case of a boat cruising through a lake. For input side for sensing, capacitive, proximity, or even pressure sensing will be considered. As simple as it sounds, this project can present challenges in areas such as programming the ripple and trailing effects and managing sensor data from each LEDs. It can also be expensive since each LED will have its own sensor and a moderate size LED array would be necessary to capture the ripple effect of water.
The second project is called ‘Dancing Shards’, which is a forest of shattered glass fragments light by LED light strips on a wooden pane. The LED strips will be programmed to change color and brightness based on the frequency spectrum of music input coming from an audio source and each shard will represent a certain amount of frequency bin of the data. A microcontroller such as Arduino will be used to manage the audio data and drive the shard LED strips. There is a video on YouTube about making the light shards and it’s shown below.
The last idea, which perhaps is my most favorite one, is ‘Ferrofluid Lights’. I got inspired about this idea through a YouTube video showing how ferrofluid mixed with glow stick substance creates very interesting and amazing patterns with changing magnetic field. As opposed to creating the changing magnetic field by hand, my idea is to build an array of mini vibration motors to create a vibrating surface, on top of which small round magnets will lie. Similar to the second project idea, the input to these motors will be the frequency spectrum of music from an audio source and each motor will represent a certain amount of frequency bin of the audio data.
