Meet the Maker: Robert Quattlebaum of Lumanoi

Wave your hand once over Lumanoi, and it’s clear why Robert Quattlebaum’s flowing LED artwork was highly recommended at Maker Faire Bay Area.

Spark of inspiration

The mesmerizing interactive creations began years ago. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2007, he attended a workshop for building a set-top box called YBox and later ended up developing YBox2 with Adafruit.

In 2010 he hacked some addressable LED Christmas lights from Costco (his teardown post was the top result for “hacking Christmas lights” for a while). And as with many things from the big box retailer, soon found he had more than he knew what to do with.

He was working at Apple, but left to help work on Nest in 2013. Nest, for those unfamiliar with the story, was eventually acquired by Google. But after decades working for major tech companies, he wanted to figure out the next step. “Life is short, so do things that you love.”

He realized that he had been happy whenever he had an oscilloscope on his desk. There was enjoyment in creating something that you can hold at the end of the day and security in work that was hard to substitute with AI. The answer was in those addressable lights.

Discovering patterns

He started playing around with different ways of diffusing them, and different forms. The shapes were inspired by the way bubbles come together and join to form straight lines. He started modeling the patterns in software, learning all about Voronoi diagrams on the way.

He messed around with no real goal, writing algorithms to create patterns, and picked out the ones he liked. Eventually, while playing around with hardware, he realized that he wanted to wave his hands over it and that they should be interactive. After all, how hard could it be?

Having worked for high-end companies, he knew that if you want to convince people to spend a lot of money, you need to make it clear that you’ve sweated the details. He experimented with glass diffusion panels, but laser-cut acrylic was much more forgiving to work with and actually achieved even tighter tolerances.

He also tried out a wide variety of laser-cut and 3D-printed diffusers before finding the mix of materials that gave the best balance of brightness, evenness, and finish, while still responding to interaction.

Altogether, it took eight months of work before he had a prototype working as well as the one at Maker Faire, which now used custom PCBs and a sandwich of diffusion media. The key thing that made it possible was to not treat each cell as a proximity sensor, but each pair of cells.

This project was also an excuse to acquire a CNC router. Because even though standard woodworking tools are essential, the CNC is where interesting things happen. He’s always learning new things, like feeds and speeds, how wood expands, and finding out the hard way why speed is important when machining plastic.

Positive reaction

Though the process began closer to tech product design — with equal time spent making new work and innovating new developments — feedback from the community proved that he’s an artist, and that the presentation evolved to reflect that.

For instance, he shows off more of the process than a typical tech company. “If secrets are all I have, then I don’t deserve to be in the space.” Which might be how his YouTube channel grew to 1.9K subscribers with seven videos.

Presenting at Maker Faire Bay Area was overwhelmingly positive. Especially because he got to be around so many other people who were excited about making things. It’s where his people were.

You can see more by following @vorialabs on Instagram, and you can visit his website voria.com.

Featured photo by Juliann Brown