This blog post will be dedicated to the hard ware part of the installation. The final execution differed from the intended form. I will be talking now about its intended form. The difference from the final executed version and reasons behind will be explained in another blogpost. Intended form of installation consists from:
- 16 programable LED strips approx 190cm tall (107 programmable LEDs) positioned in the circle.
- Pair of WiFi motion tracking gloves
- Control Station
- Pole with ToF sensor and Bluetooth for triggering the animation (or AV Game)
Ring
Gloves contain micro-controller ESP32, IMU sensor BNO055 for tracking the motion, DC-DC buck converter to bring small LiPo battery voltage of 3.7V down to desired 3.3V (operational voltage for both, ESP32 and BNO055). Raw x, y, z data from sensor are processed in micro-controllers and sent via WiFi on separate channels into Control Station.
Control Station contains two ESP32 receivers for each glove. Data those are being split and sent into Teensy 4.0 containing logic which converts specific angles from the 360 degrees radius into specific MIDI note of pre-programmed scales, as well as one MIDI CC control. Each MIDI note covers 45 degrees of the circle. Teensy 4.0 can be directly connected with any DAW. Second avenue from the data split is into two Teensy 4.1 which controls LED interface. Each Teensy 4.1 is handling 8 strips. I have chosen this way because I found necessary to use library octows2811. This library enables very fast LED animations simultaneously in comparison to other libraries like FastLED or NeoPixel. I tried those too and found them very inefficient for real-time and fast applications. Control Station also contains a Bluetooth module which receives data from the pole’s ToF sensor.
The Pole contains ToF (Time of Flight) sensor which essentially measures the proximity from and object. Distance data are being sent via Bluetooth module to the Control Station. In the installation it is used to trigger the initial animation and sound upon entering The Ring.