Um Ted had some perfect examples of um uh, light painting which is um using a camera with a long exposure and then a light source and moving around in creative ways to get very, very unusual effects. So here's a lot of stuff. There's a there's a huge community of Open Source yeah, pass around open source sorry light painters out there already. Um, you can get some really eerie effects you can highlight uh, highlight buildings and Landscapes and and things that you wouldn't otherwise kind of see.

um I Really love that concept and I wanted to a way to make the images a bit more controlled. um as in put a particular effect that I want on them. So what I did was take. Here's another example.

this is robot andiron sources in the hack space. Um, a few people recognize this. This is this guy's an internet celebrity and we, uh, we come the steps of the H of the upper house for an evening and I really love this sort of this sort of image because it shows that it's actually really there. It's not photoshopped in.

um, you can see the the reflections anywhere that you've got a a slightly wet surface. We're really lucky cuz it happened to be raining. Um, here's you can see the actual the way that it's interacting with the environment. If you have Tles and things, they look spectacular as well.

Um, so what's involved with actually making a lightsthe this is a complete set of the hardware right here. Um I've actually built two of them. There's two of them in photo. What it is is the Imes created on the machine on the PC First of all, so you can choose a picture.

you can choose text, um, whatever you like. There's a a set of software which I made which will automatically take text or images and convert it into a series of pixels that are uh compatible with this script. This little thing here is a radio link I'm sure you guys have seen the Xbs. no okay, oh well.

they're um uh, small I think this one's 900 MHz radio and it's uh, basically if you're doing a Electronics project, it's a fantastic way to get data from one one location to another and sort of forget about the actual Uh implementation on it. That might be a bit of heresy to a radio club actually. I You can just treat this like a Serial pipe and I just pipe the D in at one end and it comes out the other and all I've had to do is set a network. Uh, a network.

uh number. Uh, if I want to do a one to one communication I can do that but at the moment it's one to many. so I can have multiple light size all uh Imaging the same information at the same time. so you can have a couple people running around in the in the photo doing weird things.

um Inside the Box itself show you on my it's not plugged in This is extremely complicated compared to what it actually needs to be. The next generation is going to be much much smaller and is actually going to live entirely inside the staff itself. So what we've got is a microcontroller on the bottom. there.

the red one. Um, it's the Uino. If anyone's familiar with them, they're They're cheap. They're friendly, They're open source.

Um, anyone can get in and use them. We got the RF module on the top. that's the XB. On top of that.

we've just got a little custom circuit board that I made which has got some voltage level converters in it. Um, because the this board is really really nice and it handles batteries really nicely. but unfortunately it's all 3.3 Vol stuff. So uh, this this script actually requires 5 volts in order to operate.

Uh, just a simple interface. I've got one push button and one dial. The dial does nothing yet, so that's future proof. The main magic is in economies of scale and the fact that you can buy this uh LED strip for about $35 a meter from China uh.

inside it, it's really hard to see, but there's actually two LEDs and then a chip for each pair of LEDs and that actually takes care of everything that's needed to drive the LEDs and all the color and all the uh, the actual interfacing. So all I do is send serial data down one end and it's clocked out the other end and it just continues along down the chain. So let just power that up test pattern and you can cut this to lengths. So if you want to make your Christmas lights s you programmable few worth of components in and in the strip.

So the software itself. um, all this is open source. it's all on my website if anyone wants to make their own. uh so you create the image.

uh there is if you want to make your own text and I'll do that right now now. actually. okay so I just go create text and what's your pul sign again Vk2 MB Vk2 MB Let's creating the text with Vk2 MB gives a nice curly font that I chose previously got the green, the inside color blue is the outside color. All this is selectable and programmable and you can change it to your satisfaction later on.

Um, it's setting saying press enter to transmit it to the Scythe my radio Link's plugged in so I just hit enter it's open the file. It's calculated that there are 290 columns wide in this image. It says I'll give each each column uh, 20 milliseconds. So the total time to do the entire thing is 5.8 seconds.

So what I'll do is and it's open seral port and it's ready to go. So this is actually like the third generation of the light side. It took me a couple generations to figure out that it was a much better idea for me to have a push button here so that I can push it when I'm in the field rather than running back to the laptop, hitting go, running back to the camera, hitting, hitting that the shutter button and then trying to get in the shot. So um, if I push this now, it'll just start displaying it.

So um, ready? when you up? Three? Oh uh, what? How long? Uh, about 6 seconds? Maybe 10 is is a moment We're going to do live science. That's true, you might see it as a bit of an after, like it might be very faint, but it should be there. Any Yeah, okay. three.

Is it best for the lights off? Maybe. Or is it yeah. If if you can turn the lights off easily, that's good. I Don't know if it doesn't work, just turn lights off.

just we'll get you something. Okay, 3, two, One. All right. it's bit hard to capture the geometry capture in here because screen there burning out.

Yeah yeah. and I've got the blue writing I Think everyone sees sees the rough principle of the idea. Here's the XP unit itself. Um, it's tiny, has uses practically no power.

Um, this one's actually sitting on a little USB Shield so you can just plug it into the PC and it shows up as a serial device. Um, it, it works out of the box with pretty much no configuration. but you can set it up to be a uh to be more more sophisticated so it will only talk one to one or it will uh. you can multicast or you can do pretty much anything you can do with a medium kind of packet.

Radio Setup um, but just over a really short range I think this one is this one is all of 60 Ms um which is actually quite Hefty this is a 60 m one is is the I think the largest one you can get? maybe? um I I Bought this originally to be the Telemetry for my Quadcopter um and ended up using it for this as instead cuz I Want a high reliability serial link because there's nothing more frustrating than getting a shot, spending 10 minutes lining up to get a shot at the steps of the Opera house and then you've lost some data cuz there was a bit of radio noise and so you've got an image which is almost perfect but this some pixels that are stuffed up Midway through the image so that's what I've got for the 60 m one. I'll pass that around if you don't want to have a look at it. um, their cheapest chips. The cheapest module is about $20 um and maybe $20 for the carrier board and the holder itself.

I've just laser cut really really quickly and glued together so together if anyone's interested is um, that that text we saw where it created the nice cursive? Uh, cursive text is actually a thing called image magic Um, which is all free. You can drive it from the command line or you can drive it from a guey. Um, so what it does is you just give it a text and it makes the image and you can do things like resize an image or you can put text in it. or you can make rectangles or you can, you know, desaturate.

Or you can do pretty much anything you would do in Photoshop from the command line. which is really, really handy when you're trying to do automated stuff like this where you just want to work with one command. Um, so that makes the image. Uh, there's a couple of Python programs which will convert any uh GIF image into a lightable image.

And then there's lightsize transmit which actually transmits it over the serial link. So those these programs are all gathered together at the moment. Um, but you can run them separately if you need to. Uh, the limitations of color.

So here's you know, the actual rainbow. Here's what this strip does at the moment. we're only limited to seven colors. Um, the next generation of strip which I've actually I actually have got but haven't been bothered to make.

the software for yet will have in. In. Instead of seven colors, it will have 16 million colors. so a little bit bigger.

16.7 Milon? Yeah, Exactly right. Exactly right. Yes, yes, it's proper 24-bit color. Um, come come to think of, it may actually be dropped down to uh, seven bits worth of color per Channel But at any rate it's um and actually that is precisely the same price as the existing one.

So the the the those those leather buggers in China just keep making it cheaper and better. Um is the light output for the LEDs matched? so for each color so because I can see you would might oversaturate on some colors and not others. Absolutely Absolutely. Um, no.

but um so this this is a this is a really good really good point. Um, this this strip. You just give it a um a seven or8 bit value for red, green and blue per pixel and you can choose from that you can choose. you know, 16 million colors.

Um, my previous iteration which never quite got into the the working stage because of some some timing issues. uh had a different module C of shift bright in each one instead of this really really cheap strip. so the entire thing cost about $500 cuz shift brights are not cheap. Um, and what the shift Brite had was in addition to you giving it the RGB, it also had a little E prom in there so it has a little uh memory that allows you to compensate for the fact that not all LEDs are created equal.

Um, so if you wanted to be incredibly angly retentive about it, you could go through and calibrate each individual LED and you go. Oh, number seven is a bit bright, so let's have it turn turn things down automatically. so I don't have to to pre-process anything that that never got off the ground. and then this stuff came out and $35 a meter is is pretty damn good.

I can't get past that. So so CLE Pressible? Absolutely, Absolutely. And it's it's a Serial Um, it's a Serial shift register. so you just you put data in this side and gets squired out the other side.

Um, and the code is completely modular. So I just say this particular chain. I've got 64 vertical pixels here and I can extend it as long as I Like So um, I have played around with making a 5 m one that I can dangle off a bridge and then walk along. Is it shift and latch? Um, is shift and latch? Or is it there's this particular strip.

There's A there's a separate, there's a clock data and a latch. y Um, the next generation of the strip which is the 16 million color one is. uh, just clock and data right? But I think there's actually a latch command or something like that that gets propagated so it's doesn't have. Yeah, you're exactly right.

If there's no latch, then what you have is the image slowly marching down the strip. um, whereas if as the way it is now, uh, the the image gets pushed, pushed there, and then rolled across on the LEDs with one command. So there's no, um, weird Persistence of vision or strange visual artifacts that you get. Although, wouldn't the long exposure take care of that? Possibly It's um, yeah, yeah.

LEDs are really unforgiving in long exposure. So um, what I was really concerned about with this initially was, um, oh, this is fine because all of these this is bang bang. Um, all of these are red, green and blue. fully on or fully off.

The next generation of stuff has, uh, everyone knows Pwm. so it does pwm of the uh, the registers sorry of the LEDs inside. So if it's got if you set your red to be half brightness, it's actually flicking it on and off at a particular frequency. and I was worried that that would show up in the long exposure photo.

I've done a couple of preliminary tests and no, it doesn't, so I'm pretty thankful for that cuz otherwise you'd get some fairly funky artifacts in your photos. So what do the Chinese make this strip for? Just yeah, yeah, yeah, um, they sell it. That's a really good question. Um, who knows what? a lot of the stuff that's on like Deal Extreme and that is actually intended for um, but must a lot shop displays and things.

Yeah, shop displays and discos and things like that Yeah, typically it comes in yeah yeah, it comes in a 5 m roll. Um, and it has a little controller board and the controller board has a couple of cheesy pre-programmed things in there so it'll It'll slice across colors and it will fade between one and the other. You know you can choose any particular color or you can have it fade between two different ones. or you know, some some reasonably limited preprogram stuff.

but they they in order to get that kind of uh, something that you put in the window at the your chemist shop or whatever. Um, they've actually made a really really sophisticated piece of techn that you can pipe through an entire image with. So I'm happy to happy to purchase it now that the prices drop down and and hack away. Um, chips taking photos? Need good friends? that'll hopefully stay good friends cuz yeah, a lot of patience is required and uh, doesn't happen quickly.

Camera can do a long exposure. Pretty much any camera can do it nowadays. even simple point and shoots. Um, the image you saw there was what was that? six characters and that was about 6 seconds.

So that's a good a good example of how long your camera needs to be open for. If it's a much longer message then I've done shots with 20 second exposures and 30 second exposures. This is areas that we're going to try in the future. Different fonts, different locations and effects.

We were really lucky to have uh, the steps of the Opera House where it was. it had just been wet and we're getting all these nice little specular Reflections off it. um W surf is fantastic Glass Walls Also fantastic. Um, if you walk at an Ang to the shot, you get this lovely swooshing effect where the image is coming out of nowhere.

Um, and there's there's a lot of way to ways to play around with it. really, just scratching the surface. So um, that's pretty much it as far as the lightsthe goes. Um, does anyone have any questions on that? Yeah, Have we triy put that on a C? Yeah, that's um, not yet.

but it's been on the to-do list actually. Um, you can. You can certainly go as you've seen. this is actually pumping out a new column of uh, new column of um data every 20 milliseconds.

I can go faster than that. That's just a nice compromise value I got for for long exposures and being able to walk across a scene consistently. So you Misty day? sorry Misty night? Yes, um so you could. You could easily attach it to a car and um, yeah.

actually got a contacted by a journalist asking me if you could use it on a race track. um and and have it sort of sweeping out behind the race car and my answer was yes, but I haven't tried it. Yeah so I've got a race car if you want to try it. might have to line that up.

Maybe I should try it on my little Subaru first. but yeah, could display the speed. yeah that's right, actually 120 mph actually really really lazy. this thing this been sitting in my car for the last couple months actually because it's a big pole and I forget to take it out when I get back home.

so do cameras do nor exposure? That's one way to find out. I just imagine scream screaming through a speed speed zone and just they look at the photo and it just says sorry, has anyone else built these um I thought I was the first. um there's actually a guy in Texas that uh has done a similar thing before but in a a much I'm going to sound cat if I say it's much less user friendly way right? Um so he pre-programs it onto a microcontroller and the way he actually edits his data is he has a big Exel sheet and then colors in the cells one by one and that makes some Arduino code in a Tex thing and then you copy and paste that put it in your IDE download it. Um, that has the advantage.

He can just work in the field with it without a laptop which is really cool, but it takes 10 times as long to set up for another shot. So So that when you did at the opera house, where light? How long would the exposure been on that? uh, about 15 seconds for the yeah and you just walked across it with the same sort of Principle as just here? Yes, absolutely. I'll just uh I'll zap back to the the uh, the photo so we can see it again. That one there? Yeah, that was about 15 seconds.

Actually, this is using two light sides. So I was standing in the front just holding mine that's actually displaying the same image, but I'm keeping it stationary so we don't actually see the text. Uh, and then a friend of mine was walking through in the background like that and getting a nice little, um, nice little sort of angle to the uh angle to the camera kind of perspective effect there. Yeah, and these people here, these were these were performing a fantastic function.

Um, they're actually blocking the light because there's a a lamp post just behind there. So we tried a couple of shots and there was this big kind of Halo there. So I was like Jen could you go stand there? Thanks! It's quite a challenge not to sort of do this as you walk along. Yeah, I'm getting it.

yeah I I I Sort of. Obviously don't know enough about cameras, but why aren't we seeing a blur of the people? The person walking behind, they're saying extremely still I'm saying I'm saying dead still and the person that's walking through you actually are seeing a blur. but it's just so so. F You can't say Okay Um, they're not.

They're not really lit up by anything. Um, and they're holding the the side out like that away from them. Um, so you're you're just seeing this very very faint. And because it's such so much bright lighting everywhere else.

Um, you can't really see them of vanishes. Yeah, pain, light. All those some painting, those people with lights can't see them. they're moving and in exactly.

There's a couple of other ones where we sort of screwed up and um, the shot doesn't come out as well as you hope. like. you walk along for a bit and then you you trip over the stick a bit or you bump it and then you end up this really weird artifact where the text goes in the middle. Yeah, and also walking at a steady pace is really really hard.

so it takes a couple of tries before you get one that looks good. and also getting everything synchronized is is really tricky as well. It's a bit easier now that I finally realized that a button on the front is a really good idea. that that took like three generations worth of code before you go button.

Yeah. awesome. Couldn't you build an accelerometer in so it works out how fast you going? Absolutely Yeah, yeah, there's there's a there's a huge amount of um of tweaking and and expansion so you could. You could actually set it up so that if you wanted to make an entire image like this so you go swish Swish and it would do an image in midair.

you could totally do that. Um, there's a a large amount of room for expansion and stuff like that so it looks like they come in half meter lengths. You can see the you see the join down there so join together. This has got like three or four strips all in series.

You can cut them uh, every two pixels y as closely as you like. Is there any limit to how long you can join these things by by default it's 5 m long. Um, it's It just behaves as a shift register so you send out in one side it comes out the other. You can I think you can even join them up as as long as you like.

The only thing is that the copper tape that runs along will have a bit of voltage drop so you'd want to have another Power bus running to it every so often. Got it? I've had 5 m strips displaying images? No problem. Nice. and then I'll just I'll start and and this is your controller here.

Maybe two amps for the whole 2 minutes? Yeah, two amp. So I'll just push the button and transmit the data to have you thought about putting this on some sort of Dolly based track system and pushing it along. And yeah, sort of. It'd be interesting to do.

You can get a lot of smooth motion with smooth motion, especially if you had something like a skateboard. and you could tilt the wheels a bit so it would do a nice little Arc Yes, that would be really cool. and maybe as the camera panned around like that, you can Pan the camera and you could have the could. oh the camera.

No, no, you couldn't cuz it's going to be a stationary photo doesn't it? Yeah, you could. You could move them in synchronization though, because you're you're walking through a 3D scene and you're leaving a ribbon of image behind you. So as long as the camera isn't moving too much or or too far in and out with respect to that size, uh, you can do whatever you like. Yeah, um.

actually after after I published it I got I got uh um, a couple people contacted me including a an advertising agency in Brazil uh that wanted to use this for a car shoe. um and they were wanting to fly me across to Brazil and and set up this big thing and wow did you take him up on that? I have I um I Haven't really heard back from them in a like CLE months so I guess that's fallen through, but that's pretty exciting for a while. Get to go to Brazil Brazil Fantastic. I Mean it's all open source.

Anyone can make their own? um so, but but they want person fly me to Brazil That's fine. yeah, can handle that. That's the Zigg receiver. XB 900 MHz Yep, is it legal? 60 Mega sorry 60 M 60 m Not a megawatt one I Can't afford that.

These are actually some samples that Ted brought in to show us um of similar light painting things. So there's a whole bunch of different techniques here. I'll give away some Secrets My My best guess at what it is for having done a bit of this stuff before is uh, that's that's kind of a, uh, an LED torch or a glow stick on a on a um, a leash and then you just spin it around right really far and sort of process as you go and eventually end up with a nice sphere. Um, you've got some uh, that would be green laser pointers highlighting a person sitting the chair.

Yep, and these these rather nice kind of explosion type things. is you set fire to steel wool and then hurl it around on a rope? or I think he used an egg beater for one of those. So brilliant. These are tricks of the trade, right? And and this really, really nice uh, tree like structure? I Haven't actually seen this technique before.

Apparently it's E wire and you're sort of jangling it around as you go, right? Um, so that's that's the technique I'm going to have to give a TR some stage.