Hi Adafruit!
Back in March you guys gave us a discount on LPD8805 LED strips, which was very sweet. Since then, our project has made some wonderful progress, and now that we have a website and kickstarter project up, I wanted to check in and say thanks.
For a bit of background, the SoundPuddle is an art installation inside a 24-foot wide dome, in which any sound you make creates ripples of color on a canopy of thousands of LEDs. It’s an interactive space of visual-acoustic synesthesia, and it’s sort of like a rudimentary holodeck. It may be the world’s only immersive sound visualizer. All of the sound inside the space is created by participants, encouraging people to play with and explore the sound spectrum.
The project is entirely open source, and all of our code so far is available on github (github.com/soundpuddle). Alvaro Lopes, the creator of the Zpuino project (alvie.com/zpuino/index.html), and myself (John English) were the electronics engineers for the project. Incase you’re not familier, the Zpuino platform we’re using is rather awesome, because it’s an Arduino compatible framework running on an FPGA. It’s much much more powerful and flexible than conventional Arduino hardware, but still very accessible and capable of using existing Arduino code.
Anyway, our website is up at: soundpuddle.org. We gave you guys a shout out on our about us page.
We’ve also just launched a kickstarter campaign for the project, so we can expand the LED array, and make other improvements and repairs to the installation. Those upgrades will allow it to go to Burning Man, Apogaea once again, and hopefully several Maker Faires. If it fits your interest, we’d be delighted for Adafruit to make a post about the project / kickstarter. We could definitely use all the publicity we can get (and we’ll turn around a buy more LEDs with the funding :p).
Whatever the case, we’re very grateful for your support back in March. That helped make the project possible, and it makes us feel good working with open source friendly companies such as yours.
Cheers!
-John