I found this post not too long ago and have been wanting to make one of these ever since. What’s making these balloons glow is the pollutants in the air around them, with colours ranging from green (signifying excellent air quality) to red (poor air quality).
Justin, this reminds me of something you might have done with your LED/Arduino knowledge.
Just a quick update…the LEDs in the freezer are still going strong, more than two days later, which is good news for any potential LED-embedded ice or snow project. The glow was way more exciting than this photo makes it appear, as I had assumed the battery wouldn’t have lasted this long at all.
Finally had the chance to pick up some more postcards, and yet continually finding myself not having them when I’m actually talking to people. Cristina picked up a bunch to distribute downtown, Josh went to Walkerville, Michelle went through campus, I’ve mostly been doing hand-offs.
Here’s the remaining pile — 250 goes pretty fast, but we need to get rid of them all by the 24th! We’re excited, hope you already have the date in your calendar!
Meeting twice in a week is awesome. I can’t say that enough. So much time makes us way more productive and makes it a lot easier to be OK with not having everyone there all the time.
First on the list, doing some really, really quick tests of the potential of embedding LEDs in ice or snow. We know, it’ll probably kill the battery and potentially the LEDs themselves, but we have some ideas that might make that worthwhile.
Continue reading “Snow, LEDs, Flights, Fill-in-the-blanks, Proofs, and Postcards”
It’s taken a number of weeks, but we finished wiring the LED sign at tonight’s Office Hours! It was a pretty incredible moment to plug in the sign, turn off the lights, and realize that we made this come together. I’m really, really, really happy with how it turned out!!! There are still a few more things we need to do before this project is completely done, and I would like to try it on batteries, but now that we know how bright it is, I think we’ll come up with some more LED projects soon.
I went through our LED sign today and removed all the LEDs that had died in our earlier efforts to learn electricity. So now we’re ready to replace these and finish up the sign! 12 out of nearly 200 LEDs isn’t too bad.
Broken City Lab Office Hours on Tuesday were hugely productive. We completely finished getting all the resistors on the LED sign, measured out all the letters with flagging tape for the EC Row Project, organized some logistics for the planning stages of a couple other upcoming projects, and figured out the title for our upcoming show in the Lebel Gallery.
Lots of photos after the jump.
We’re in week 3 of this LED sign project, and we now know how to finish it up. We had previously soldered all the anodes on the LEDs, but we were a bit confused about the connections of the cathodes and resistors. As we had been working off of a MAKE video, which breezed over the connections, we realized we really weren’t entirely sure of how to make those final connections.
Michelle and I finished soldering the anodes on the LED sign yesterday morning. Next is soldering all the resistors to the cathodes—this is a hilariously longer process than I think any of us anticipated, but it’s good. I’m really looking forward to seeing it lit up!
Also, thank you to whoever passed on the big roll of 4″ red tape!!!
Broken City Lab Office Hours last night were hugely productive due, in no small part, to the many amazing people around the table last night. We completed a test with the flagging tape at Lebel (as you can see above) for the EC Row project and continued working on the LED sign. There’s lots of pictures of all the action after the jump.
