LEDscape On Display at Maker Faire

Two projects featured at Maker Faire caught my eye because, well, I’m obsessed with LED displays right now. It turns out they have cool software in common.

First there’s the Orbital Rendersphere, a spherical persistence-of-vision display built by Hoboken MakerBar that consists of a pair of 4-foot hoops with LED strips on them, rotating at 450 RPM to create an awesome POV display. The project was written up on BeagleBoard.org.

The other project is NYC Resistor’s Future Crew, an interactive game made up of RasPi-equipped vintage electronics. The central pedestal (pictured above) has an octagonal RGB LED Matrix (the “Octoscroller“) along with additional LED strips. The Octoscroller is made up of eight Adafruit 16×32 matrices and they display information during the course of the game.

What these two projects have in common (besides glorious LED goodness) is Trammell Hudson’s LEDscape, which is BeagleBone cape and firmware that help the BB control 544 meters of WS2811 LED strips, drawn at 30 fps. LEDscape is open source. If you’re considering building a LED project with a kajillion lights, definitely check it out.