‘Oasis’ by Kent Caldwell: Adafruit NeoPixels Embedded in Operatic Ballet/Hip-Hop Theater

Oasis (photo by John Rohling)

Adafruit forums user (and Director/Choreographer) Kent Caldwell writes,

I had some awesome help from the forums here last fall while I was fabricating multiple characters and props that used Neopixels with an nrf24l01 module for wireless control. This was for a collaborative project between Cirque du Soleil and the Nevada Ballet Theatre in Las Vegas.

I finally have some good images / documentation of the project and wanted to post here to share. I’m hoping to do a write up, guide, tutorial, or something, but this project was very multi-faceted so I need to break it down into useful components for folks. I learned a lot about wireless control, state-machine coding to eliminate delay from my code, working with long lengths of wire between neopixels, large scale paper mache sculpture, etc….

Oasis (photo by Kent Caldwell)

He continues,

Cheers and a massive thank you to the Adafruit forums / support folks who helped me troubleshoot when I was in way over my head with a project on this scale.

No Kent, thank YOU for sharing! What an amazing project!

Here’s a bonus video:

Oasis [2016]

Direction, Concept, Choreography – Kent Caldwell
Music – Martin St. Pierre
Costumes – Chris Larson, Castille Ritter, Ricky Dale Martin
Makeup – Emily Harris

Cast: Kailee Ann Albitz (singer), Jun Tanabe, Kaori Fukui, Trent Jeray, Elizabeth Girst, Emily Lovdahl, Kelly Ann Mitchell, Rachel Thompson, Michelle Quenon, Danielle Maas

See more images and read more here.


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