Lightning Globe Documentation – Nam Tran

For this project I aim to create an interactive piece that connects people with events that’s happening all around us, and I also want to play around with real time data. After lots of research, and heavily inspired by an older project of mine, Twitch Plays Drums ( https://github.com/nhtranngoc/twitch-plays-drums ), the Lightning Globe was born….

Polish and Present – Nam Tran Ngoc

This past week I focused on making the globe much more presentable and reliable, both hardware and software wise. The globe casing was causing me trouble since it was too small, so I scaled it up and doubled the size. This results in a massive globe at 13” diameter. And rather than winding the LED…

Everything Workingish – Nam Tran

Over the week I’ve made substantial progress on my lightning cube. No longer just a sad, non-functional pile of LEDs on the floor, it now has a shape and it blinks! Last week I was struggling to get the LED strip working. I presumed this was a faulty strip and was dead on arrival, so…

Failure, Fantastic Failures – Nam Tran

With the software mostly done, this week I decided to tackle the hardware part of the project, mainly converting lightning events into blinking lights on the LED strip. For this I will need my old Arduino board and WS2812 LED strip. First hiccup I ran into was the Arduino board refused to connect. Keep in…

Nam Tran – Maquette

This week, I worked on the software side of the Lightning Globe. The goal is to find out if the project is feasible and how would I go approaching it. First, I tracked down the source of the lightning data. Since Lightning Map, does not offer any Application Programming Interface (API), that I could connect…

Concept Proposal – Nam Tran

So far I have a couple of big ideas I’m thinking of, both of which revolves around the use of LEDs, probably RGB. My goal for this project is to incorporate either user interaction or live data feed. 1. Theremin Light Installation The first one is a Theremin-based light installation. The idea is to use…

Light Artists – Hari & Deepti

Hari and Deepti are a husband-and-wife artist team from Mumbai, India. Their work centers on light boxes using paper cut diorama. The principle is quite simple: Layers and layers of hand cut paper are stacked on top of each other, then enclosed in a box and back-lit by LED strip. This result in a magical,…

Nam Tran – Introduction

My childhood home was dad’s own little workshop. Our little 400 square foot, two story shacks of a house always smelled like wet paint and curing resin. He likes to experiment with things, and doing everything with his own hands since it has to be “just as he likes it”. I would watch him sculpt…