Tron light show made with Arduino-controlled stepper motors

Arduino Music


Kim Pimmel’s amazing effects created with a record turntable and some Arduino-controlled stepper motors.

I’ve been interested in taking my Light Study photo series and evolving them into motion pieces. I shot a lot of footage for a VJ gig for FITC San Francisco. So I edited together those stop motion sequences, mashed up some audio from the Tron Legacy trailers, and out came Light Drive.

The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.

To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing.

The light sources include cold cathode case lights, EL wire, lasers and more.

If you like this video, check out.

Light Studies

2 thoughts on “Tron light show made with Arduino-controlled stepper motors

  1. the_b_roll says:

    Awesome and inspiring! Very cool. Time to experiment with my record player and CCFL tubes now.

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Mark Frauenfelder is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Make: magazine, and the founder of the popular Boing Boing blog.

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