LED Labs

10/06/2024

Yes, I know this was long ago, but I finally edited the images from this UnScruz 2024, and they are PARTICULARLY lovely. Please share!

44 new items · Album by Christopher Schardt

07/17/2024

My new LED piece is a giant prayer wheel, like you find on the side of the trail in Nepal. It spins when a human gets curious enough to try spinning it. Then its LEDs change color quickly enough to make use of Persistence of Vision to create images.

Here are the first images of its first night spinning. It will be at Burning Man this year, somewhere in deep playa. :-)
https://photos.app.goo.gl/uhAT791QhoG2qqRn7

07/10/2024

I'm looking for an animator! I'm making this piece for Burning Man this year:
http://ledlabs.co/manipadme2024

For daytime fun, I've integrated 32 metal panels with slots in them. 32 frames of animation will be attached to the insides of each panel. When the cylinder spins and a visitor looks through the slots, he/she sees a nice little animation.

I need a volunteer to draw this animation! Me and my crew have a few ideas of what this animation might be, but no matter what it is we need someone to generate the frames. Interested? Know anyone else who might be interested?

7488 LEDs in a spinning 8' x 5' cylinder

02/21/2024

Here is how Mariposa looked at LoveBurn 2024:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/E59mT3zRjB2Y14iTA

12/09/2023

Ilya, Valeria Choupina, and I brought Mesmer to the Bard AI holiday party last night. It was a hoot!

29 new items · Album by Christopher Schardt

02/09/2017

10/12/2016

People regularly ask me how they can operate their LED pieces with LED Lab via cat5 - hardwired - instead of WiFi. I just wrote the normal response to one user, and thought I'd repeat it here:

You get this adapter from Apple:
http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0W2AM/A/lightning-to-usb-3-camera-adapter?fnode=91

You plug a USB/cat5 adapter into this, along with your power cable, then plug it into your iPad/iPhone. You need a 12W power supply, which MOST of the iPad power supplies are, but not all. If yours is 10W, you’ll need to buy a 12W one, which isn’t expensive.

With a hard-wired connection, you don't see the occasional animation hiccups you sometimes see with WiFi. Plus, you won't have any WiFi congestion/slowdown problems.

BTW, even if you see your piece working fine with WiFi at home, it might not do well in public exhibition. This is because most everyone has a smartphone, which is constantly pinging every WiFi network it can find. Even if these smartphones don't make a connection, they can grind WiFi throughput so slow that soon you're getting 5-10FPS or even less. You can address this by activating the "Hide SSID" option in your WiFi router's config page. You may have to manually enter the WiFi network's name henceforth, but you'll dramatically improve WiFi performance when there are many people in attendance.

Transfer photos and videos to your iPad Pro with Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter. Buy now with fast, free shipping.

08/09/2016

An LEDLab user just asked me whether there is a count of LEDs that causes problem with LEDLab and PixelPusher. I ended up writing a bit a of a treatise on LED display performance. I thought that some of you might find it useful:

My pieces, Firmament and Nova each have 21,600 LEDs. Missive has 20,736. All work just fine.

There ARE potential problems as LED count increases, though:
1) a high count of UDP packets can slow down communication
2) frame rate can be slowed by calculating more pixel values

These slow downs come on gradually though. You'll definitely notice this before the problems are bad.

Here's something I only learned recently: For my pieces, the biggest factor slowing down frame rate is the extent to which I'm exerting the PixelPushers. They report back to LED Lab how fast they'd like to receive packets. They definitely demand a slower rate (which slows down LED Lab) when they are fully-loaded - that is - you're using close to 480 LEDs/output on all 8 outputs. So using more PixelPushers with fewer LEDs each CAN speed things up. This is particularly true with slower-responding LED chips like WS2801.

Another thing I've noticed is that using a lousy router can slow things down. Worse, it can cause jittery display. If you can use hard-wired connections (no WiFi), you'll definitely see better performance. Apple sells a new USB/Lightning adapter that has a socket into which you can inject power. You can then plug a USB/Ethernet adapter into that. It's the bomb!

If you need WiFi, definitely use the 5GHz band. I highly recommend the Xiaomi Mini router. Also, know that when you've got 1000s of people attending your piece, their smartphones can KILL WiFi response. This is because they're all pinging every WiFi network they can find, all the time apparently. Best to have a router on which you can turn off SSID transmission. (Your iPad will remember the network if you've connected to it before you hide SSID.)

Lastly, use as beefy an iPad as you can - iPad Air 2 or better. I've noticed that the iPad Pro is noticeably faster.

07/20/2016

I gave a talk entitled "LED Art Supplies for the Masses" at the GlowCon conference/party last weekend. In it, shared my thoughts about the various LED products, LED chips, LED controllers, and LED Lab. If you're interested, here are my notes from that talk: http://schardt.org/ledlabs/GlowCon2016.pdf

04/06/2016

The public debut of Nova is approaching.

This Saturday, April 9, 6pm:
Cocktails | Dinner
Performance | Live Art Auction
Supporting The Crucible’s Education Programs
Tickets and more info: http://goo.gl/Iuu638

03/30/2016

A container arrives for

03/25/2016

First test of a "diamond" of Nova.