Final

Zack Steinberg

I wanted to make an art piece that visualized a brain. I've always been fascinated by neurons. The project is setup up as a dodecahedron with LED strips along the edges and buttons on the vertices. There are 20 edges and 30 vertices. 

The vertices are designed so that 3 edges robustly get attached to it. Intially I wanted to avoid using screws but ultimately decided to use them because I needed a hard connection. The vertices were 3D modelled in Solidworks and 3D printed.  

For the behavior of the light, I wanted pulses to travel from vertex to vertex, then choose a path to follow and travel down that edge. The code is divided into 3 parts: a strip section, a hub section, and a pulse section.

-Each strip corresponded to an edge and kept track of the LEDs for that section.
-The hubs handled the connections between different strips
-And each strip had 2 pulses: one for each direction. Each STRIP would know whether it had a pulse or not.

This worked great, but then I had a problem: from a distance the dodecahedron looked mesmerizing, but when someone got up close, it was hard to figure out what it was doing. There were lots of pulses cluttered it up and they were being absorbed into a hub and waiting. In response to that, I decided to make it easier to track the pulses by adding trails, removing the "holding" and giving the pulses priority when a button is pressed.