This coming Saturday (16th March) is Arduino Day — a worldwide birthday celebration of the open-source hardware and software company, Arduino.
They produce fantastic pieces of technology which enable innovative and community focused creations. And having used it for a few client projects — including Cisco Live in Berlin to showcase the theme of technology disruption which provided delegates with an opportunity to create and build IoT in a very short timescale — we wanted to mark this birthday celebration in a way that truly embraced the community that makes Arduino so unique.
Whilst we have a fully-fledged Digital team, there are many of us whose knowledge of building circuits is a long-forgotten memory of secondary school science lessons. Therefore, we decided to ask the whole agency to spend 5 days in our innovation Lab, collectively building a 3D LED cube which would play a colourful array of patterns.
So, what did this entail?
On the first day we set about looking into the many ways we could build this Arduino cube, and defined our shopping list. There are many videos and tutorials online around building this — however we followed this one (with a few adjustments).
Day two was about starting the build. We took 64 of the 1,000 LEDs that had arrived and split them into the corresponding colour groups before adding them to each of the 4-cardboard mapped out wall. Turns out there is such thing as tiny LEDs and (as many might expect) this was the point where we collectively realised that this wasn’t as easy as the videos made it look.
In an ideal world the third day would have seen the LED cube looking like a cube, but unfortunately the size of the LEDs had made it harder to connect them together and in turn had made the structure very fragile. After a trip out to the shops for some emergency supplies, we continued to build the four walls needed. Soldering each light together, positioning the positive ends of the lights in a line and connecting them to a metal cable.
On day four the cube began to take shape — after we threaded the 4 walls through the metal cable and soldered the negative ends of the LED lights together. Although on paper this should have been very quick, with a team of amateur solders, it ended up being a full day task.
Finally, on Day five we moved on to using C programming to make sure the LED lights lit up and flashed the different patterns. We connected all the lights to Arduino before programming each light to display a different pattern every few seconds — and with 64 lights this took a while — but to the joy of the team, by the end of the day we were successful.
This was a team project that saw each GPJer leave with a new understanding of the elements needed to create a technology project from scratch. To create the pioneering digital projects for our clients, we know the importance of experimenting, and that is exactly the reason we created The Lab. To have the space to use technology, like Arduino, to play around and establish what is possible!
And what does that lead to? Have a look at some of our recent projects here.
Written by Caitlin Kobrak, Social Media Manager for George P. Johnson UK.
