I bought Burning Man tickets today. Whee. It still feels awfully wintery to be thinking about going to the desert, but the first four tiers of tickets are already sold out, and word is that they’re going to cap the total number of tickets this year. I’ve heard similar rumours in years past, but this year they’re going so far as to say they’re not going to offer ticket sales at the gate, which makes me think they might actually mean it.

Last night I had a work party for the Shame Project lanterns. We built fourteen microcontroller boards, each equipped with four cheap current regulators. Each lantern will have red, green, blue, and white LEDs, and the controllers will be linked in a ring network. They will run an evolving rhythm pattern, and they will pass pieces of their “genomes” around the network. Viewers will see the animations drift together and back apart over time as the controllers mutate and then re-converge the data driving the rhythm pattern.

The work party was fun – I did a lot of prep work writing up instruction sheets with diagrams and explanations, and I designed a very simple, almost primitive board where all the solder points are easy to reach and most of the traces are on the opposite side of the board. It seemed to work; the skill level ranged from “novice” to “moderate” and yet we got all the work done ahead of time with minimal rework. I still have to test all the boards, but the manufacturing process was so smooth that my hopes are high.