Becky Stern documents how she made four LED poles for a recent art performance in New York City.

The project brief, as it was pitched to me, was to create four tall uprights for the corners of an eight-foot by eight-foot raft. These LED poles needed to start an animation on their own after a five-minute countdown timer, and be quick to deploy. Just in case anything were to fail, the show must go on without human intervention, so they needed to have as much redundancy as possible built into the design.

So, I designed a set of four independent circuits, one on each pole, that contained a strip of pixels that would go up the pole and then over to the top of its neighbor, with some slack to drape in between the uprights. This design ended up looking like an LED huppah.

Oh, and I had one week before the show to build everything, so this is a speed project!

The project uses Adafruit Pro Trinket or Metro 5V microcontrollers and several NeoPixel strips.

See the video below and more on Instructables.