Matthew Doll

Flex, Interactive Wall

Spring 2010

Flex, was a project exploring Interactive Architecture.

One Arduino is in the background acting like a remote. It generates the base color/animation for the wall. The 'A' buttons allow you to pick a background program.

Some of the current ones are:

  • Solid color: the sliders determine the color;
  • Rainbow: one of the knob determines the speed and direction.
  • Fade: loops through the leds fading each one

The 'B' buttons set the interaction program.
Currently you can choose:

  • Light only: the wall only lights up where people are,
  • Glow white: the white LEDs glow where people are
  • Shift Hue: shifts the hue of the LEDs where people are

The remote sends the 'B' value to the receiver box along with the value of the first knob.

The other 2 arduino's are in the receiver box along with an ATX power supply, a breadboard with 2 tlc5940's and a cat5 patch panel to make for easy connections to the led drivers, servos and proximity sensors.

Read more about it on the Project Blog

Note: I did not include the TLC5940 Library, you will need to download it from the Arduino Playground.

Download the code digitalwall-0.1.zip

There are three parts:
1) The arduino that generates the background color/animation.
2) The arduino that reads the distance sensors
3) The arduino that receives serial data from the other 2 arduinos and generates a modifier based on the sensors and applies it to the background color and servos.

This is the code that we ran on the arduinos during our presentation.