Didier Briand shared with us a project created by students:
Here is my student’s last year project from Château-Gontier in France, a digital water screen control with a Raspberry Pi and custom Attiny boards. 4 students built it for their Baccalauréat with major in Engineering (saSASage 17), from start to end. The main difficulty was the money, that’s the reason why there’s only twenty servo valves but program in python should pilot hundreds of valves next year 😉
Total cost didn’t exceed 250$ without water pump. (read more here – in French)
And from the project page (using Google Translate):
The initial objective of this project, led by a group of four students, was to mix art and technology. Exchanges and visits, in close collaboration with their teacher of Philosophy, were conducted around the work of contemporary artists, particularly those of Arnaud Fabre and Pierre Besson.
The selection of students is then focused on the construction of a digital water wall. There are in the market for similar products costing them suitable for the exclusive use of professionals (salons, malls, shows, theme parks, etc.).
They developed a solution for 70h accessible to the general public in terms of cost, implementation and ease of use. The water wall, of a width of one meter, is constituted by a plurality of individually controlled jets 20 through as many valves.
Control of each valve is provided by a series of e-cards developed for this project and coupled to a Raspberry pi. The management software is coded in Python, it provides processing and sending a user-selected picture. It appears in “black and white” on the water wall in the manner of a screen to scroll vertically.
The prototype is built around a modular architecture and only the cost allocated to the project has limited the number of nozzles.
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