Sean Connell

Engineer, hang glider pilot, film photography enthusiast, musician.

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3D Printable Parametric “Bullet Style” LED Diffuser

10mm_led_interface_overview.jpg

Diffusers make or break LED art. I’ve wanted to play around with 3d printed diffusers as they offer not only an easy way to manufacture diffusers but also allow easy rapid prototyping iteration until the project looks just how you want. I think it’s a great application for 3d printers.

I wanted to prove out (quickly before TTITD) a basic, but tasteful, diffuser for my bike I could recognize. I’m most productive in the 11th hour and threw this together the week before I left, so some of this is a bit rough. Anyhow here’s an openscad design for a grid based diffuser for these 10mm driver in epoxy leds. Here’s how it looks from the front. This is two cubes taped together, 25 leds each. The LED strips come in 50s so this is sort of the simplest way to use all of them. Alternatively you could run a 9x9 and clip and LED, but I digress…

led_interface_front.jpg

…here’s the back. The wiring isn’t that big of a...

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Electric Sheep in 4k

I’ve loved the electric sheep project, in theory and result, for over a decade now.

However as time has worn on those old renders, even the 1080p ones, are starting to show their age. Since AMD is selling processors like they’ve got something to prove again, I decided to burn some time and silicon into rendering a 4k no-holds-barred high quality electric sheep render.

Building on the excellent curated flock and script utilities by Simon I rendered about 2 hours of video at 4k of the same flock of sheep. It took about 6 months on an overclocked Ryzen 1700 system stuffed under my couch. The encoding took a fair bit of time too. As the result is tens of gigs and I’m not sure how many people will want to download it (a lot, I expect!) I’m hosting it as a torrent.

So I give you, oh internet, Electric Sheep in 4k.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:967f9b9bbed78bb7ed1171a18fa3d1f56c325dd0&dn=4ksheep_26...

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Getting back to LED art and realizing you were never in: A mile high survey of today’s LED options.

What is this, exactly

For the last few months I’ve been going from old to new in terms of how modern LED art is done. This post serves as a summary around what I’ve learned about how modern protocols, drivers, data driving and generation seem to be done. I don’t claim to be an authority, but I definitely have an opinion.

key point

Creating LED art installations is a lot easier thanks to the advent of a few pieces of technology and their combined use to enable close to plug and play design and operation.

  • OPC (controller agnostic control protocol)
  • High quality LED data drivers (including color correction & other important features)
  • WS2811/2/2b Cheap PWM drivers integrated in LEDs
  • Great off the shelf animation controller options

If that was the key then this is the Lock

The land before light

I went to school for Electrical and Computer Engineering. I had a leg up in...

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