Eva’s big Flowerz sculptures from 2010 have been dragged out to Burning Man and to dozens of other events around Seattle over the last four years, and they’ve definitely taken a beating. My original electronics design was intended for a single, permanent indoor setup, so I’m surprised the lights survived being taken down and put back up in all kinds of environments as well as they have. They’ve gotten increasingly cranky, though, and now that half of them have died it’s definitely time for a replacement set.

LED and controller technology have come a long way since I designed the original lights. The new hardware is simpler, cheaper, and much more sophisticated; the new lights will have four times as many addressable pixels, so the animation space will now be two-dimensional (in polar coordinates) and not just a one-dimensional ring. What’s more, I had to individually hand-solder over a thousand through-hole LEDs for the old lights – there were dozens of tiny little wires running every which way. With the new system, the LEDs come mounted on strips of tape, all bussed up, so one control wire and two power wires are enough for eight RGB pixels. It’s AMAZING.

Stefan S. has been helping out with this project, and in just a couple nights of work we’ve finished all the soldering for two of the lights, with a lot of progress made on the other four. One more work session will finish the job. This is… I don’t remember exactly how many hours I spent on the originals, but it was in a whole different order of magnitude.

It’s a little bittersweet, opening up the old flower lights, tearing out what are now hilariously clunky, awkward, inefficient electronic devices that were nevertheless the very best I could do at the time, and replacing them with a project so simple it feels like cheating… but really, the hardware was always just a display for the animation algorithm, and that’s still the bit where the Artâ„¢ comes in.