Lighting Green Christmas

Inspiration

Coming from a sustainable living obsessed household, upcoming tuings while making them is a natural instinct. We after a lot of thought and effort decided to do a two part project, 1. Visualization of music my right now current software, processing. And wth the holidays going on, we wanted to create something that lights up a room and while remaining sustainable in its approach.

What it does

So the visualization application takes a song and draws a reactive graphic on the screen that loads a file and creates the visualization while playing it. The graphic also reacts to the cursor movement and has some colour variations.

Our part 2 of the project is a LiFi-Pi lamp that has LED strips that are controlled by the audio output of the pi in a series circuit and when shone on a solar panel takes the signal which is connected to a speaker. We have made two physic designs for the design to act as a lamp, one as a hanging lamp and the other as a special holiday hacks themed setup.

How we built it

For the visualizer, we used p5.js to build the entire application. For the sustainable holiday lamp we used leds, raspberry pi, volumio, miscellaneous supplies like battery connectors, zero pcb, crocodile wires and jumpers for the tech part. For the aesthetic part, we used a lot of old discarded glass bottles, like wine bottles, coffee bottles, etc, a discarded tyre, old CDs and some more miscellaneous supplies like paint, ropes.

Challenges we ran into

We spent the better part of the weekend trying to work with unity as our visualizer, we have starting getting the hang of the software and navigation for the time being, we wanted to visualise our music on the lamps but we later decided to clear our visualization concepts using processing and work on unity from scratch next weekend. For the lifi lamp the circuit though once understood sinple enough, was definitely a task figuring out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

So much!! Our aim from the beginning was the best dressed hack, so we spent a lot of time designing and preparing our final bottle and lamp setup. The result was definitely worth the effort.

What we learned

Tons!! Researching is the best part of the hackathon always. You start with one idea, as soon as you start reading about the tools, the world literally just opens up.

What's next for Lighting Green Christmas

More interactions! We want to make the entire setup a lot more interactive. First we are plaaning to add a camera to the pi and up our p5 game by adding teachable machine and posenet. Next we want want to add more control to led strips so maybe replace or add to the current arrangement addressable RGB led strips. We are very excited to add and build on this project.

Built With

• arduino
• lifi
• processing
• raspberry-pi
• volumio