Houston, we have a launch platform.

Launch platform construction begins.

Finished.

Bobsicle takes a crash course in RGB pixels

Considering that I knew nothing a month ago, I feel pretty confident that we are on the right track with the lighting.

We will have 3000 individually addressable RGB LED Pixels on the "belly" of The Mothership. We are using 5v WS2811 pixels we got from Ray Wu.  

After a lot of research, I've decided to go with 3 San Devices e682 controllers. 

We are going this route because we are controlling a lot of pixels and will be running DMX over Ethernet with something called the E1.31 protocol. Many thanks to Jim St. John of SanDevices and the friendly people in the DoItYourselfChristmas forums.

If you are interested at all, I highly recommend the SanDevices primer.

The flow looks like this:

We're in!

Just got our acceptance email from the DMV today. Now the work really begins. Where's my sawzall?

Cutting some width

The Burning Man DMV only allows vehicles less than 12 feet wide on the city streets. A 20 foot wide vehicle would have to stay on the Playa. Since we want to go everywhere we've been working on ways for the wings to fold up. Here's one idea.

3d Views

A few screen grabs from the Sketch up model. The saucer is now 20 feet in diameter instead of 14.

Real world model

A meat world model. Closing in on the final design.

The idea for this mutant vehicle is to put lights in the air and on the move. Here's how the lights will (hopefully) work.