Diodome Animation Editor.

We’re building an art project for Burning Man this year that shows hundreds of RGB leds on an 18ft geodesic dome. We’re controlling the WS2811 drivers on the LED strings with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino using the excellent Adafruit NeoPixel library. One of the things we really wanted to do was to allow people to create their own animations using JavaScript in the browser. This we accomplished fairly easily using THREE.js and Tween.js to create a simple editor window that could allow you to write JavaScript to control a simulation of the dome.

But how to get the JavaScript animations from the browser to work on the hardware that we’re going to setup in the desert? Simple! Use NodeJS on a Raspberry Pi and stream out LED color values to an Arduino over serial to control the LEDs. I’ve written a blog post describing how we’re accomplishing this here: http://www.delarre.net/posts/from-node-to-diode/

The main site for the project is available at http://diodome.heroku.com and we’re fundraising for the project at http://igg.me/at/diodome.

We hope you like it, and thanks so much for the NeoPixel library it has made
our lives so much easier!