Well first, I forgot to create this post until late. But that doesn’t count.

I tried a lot of things that didn’t work. The original idea for the project was to have it on a large and sparse array of LEDs, and diffuse the light with smoke.

Right off the bat, a large and sparse array won’t work. For some reason, I kept frying the LED strip and it stopped working. I tried again and again and new ones just stopped working. Anyway, since the lights would be spread out, it would be difficult to diffuse it.

Instead I realized this project would work better on a smaller array – only 6 inches by 6 inches, quarter the original size. But the packet the lights came in diffused it beautifully.

I spent a lot of time calculating the perfect equation to model a wave, but realized in the end that the simplest one was the best one, because the ones that looked more natural just looked weird on the bowl with the lights.

One challenge that I definitely had to solve was the computation time. It took a long time for the screen to update what it looked like. I tried to solve it by making a simpler function and pre-computing the wave. I ended up re-writing the code and it suddenly became faster, but not as fast as I wanted it to be.

but that was a good thing. I realized that the somewhat choppy nature goes well with the pixelated display, and would contrast well with the continuous operation of a physical moving part (that needs to be added this week!).