Over the course of a month or two, at the end of 2019 a good friend Adam and I set out an intention of making a light that could be controlled directly by a digital music performer as an extension of their own synthesisers. Having performed many times live under many aliases (Re:creation, Oversoul, Peak etc) Adam has always felt when playing at mid level venues there's a detach from the performer and the lighting. Often the lighting doesn't sync perfectly with the beat, drops or key sections of the music being performed. 

With this project of the "Light Sail" we set about to remedy this situation and create a flexible midi controlled light, that could be controlled via ableton/DAWs or midi sent out from synthesisers. Allowing midi access alleviates many issues in responsivity in performance and crystallises a sense of dynamism. We're not at the whim quickly crunching FFT data or a less than ideal peak detection process, or dare I say it.. the LD with no sense of rhythm! Usually when playing larger events there's no problem, there's a proper professional with the right tools, software and hardware, but it's not always the case at small capacity venues, when auto-party-mode is enabled on the lights. 

This post is an insight into my design and iteration process as I create a prototype of these light triangles. The project is not finished, I've written the code for midi control and created two stacked triangles, the lattices will come later. 

And then I started exploring how to take the triangles into the 3D world:

You may have noticed I'm a fan of the cuboctahedron; there's no other shape like it:

As it stands I need to work out how it stands. I have an idea, and it's a good one, but it requires me to essentially start from scratch, which I will, and the cuboctahedron will exist made of light, but I'm afraid it will look slightly different to this, re-use till you have to re-invent! It's not a problem starting from scratch, the proceeding iteration of the 3d form will use less energy, and consume less materials, so big win with a little more time investment.

This is the state of the project in the real world:

Current state of interactivity/coding project:

Unfortunately there are some issues, and I'm not going to ignore them here. While doing a drum fill decelerating at one stage of the video, there's a press that's not detected. I know the issue here, I'm using very high quality LEDs with clock/data line, so there's not an issue with timing of loops like with WS2812's. This issue is reading midi on the microcontroller, the loop is flipping back and fourth between controlling the led's and reading incoming midi, what I need to do is write a non-blocking function that reads midi every 5ms and controls leds 5ms later, the library I'm using requires an led animation call to be updated minimum at 10ms intervals. I've got a smoothing/interpolation between led colours per request from Adam, he wanted a trigger-able glide between colours, this has some advantages even if the data from control change values is slightly steppy the smoothing should sort it out. 

Also yes that is masking tape on that nice metal triangle! I wouldn't be for long, I need to buy a pillar drill to make precise mounting holes, I don't know how I've got this far with just a cordless drill. 

Further explorations would be to increase the amount of triangles. I have all the interconnecting pieces of the triangle lattice made at the end of last year, and have written the code in a fairly modular way so that I only need to change two variables to increase the size, those being pixel count, and tile amount. 

Please get in touch if you'd like to collaborate in helping me materialise this project further. Also get in touch if you'd like one yourself, or you're interested in building one yourself and would like to buy the steel connectors I've created. 

I'm sure there's greater scope than just a light for a musician, I can imagine beneficial therapeutic applications, light therapy, museum/art installations or these lights being used as an architectural light.