Choose Your Own Color: Touch Sensitive Holiday Lights
A gorgeous holiday display that you can touch, via NYmag
Now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s on: the pointillist arms-race to string as many lights as possible onto massive spruce trees, museums, monuments, archways, balconies, balusters and every storefront in as many public spaces across Manhattan. Lights, lights, lights are the city’s true holiday-season tradition, and they dust every corridor of our holiday journey. Luminaries, opening in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place on December 2, is an attempt at something somewhat new.
David Rockwell — the exacting mind behind the clean lines of JFK’s Terminal Five and the anesthetized modernism of Nobu outposts across the globe — grafts onto the massive interior of Brookfield Place (the space formerly known as the World Financial Center) in the form of 650 LED-lit hanging skylights, resembling a thumb-tacked tapestry draped from the ceiling. Three “wishing stations” scattered throughout the garden’s floor plan, and connected to a central computer brain, allow for dexterous visitors to choose a color. Once their “wish” is made at the touch-sensitive stations, that color is pushed out across the hanging rows of light.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
