Creative Embedded Systems Final Project — Interactive Light Painting
For my final project in this course, I chose to combine painting and LED lights to make an interactive light painting tool. I painted a large 30 inch by 40 inch heavy cotton canvas and attached LED light strips to the back. The user of the interactive light painting then uses a joystick to control the direction that the lights move in as well as the color of the lights. The joystick is mounted to the back of the painting’s top right corner so that the entire interactive system is contained and does not require a separate external enclosure.
This project was partially inspired by the children’s toy Etch A Sketch which allows the user to draw lines using two knobs. I really enjoyed Etch A Sketch because of how it allows the user to create very straight lines and geometric patterns. At this age I would often get frustrated trying to draw straight lines and shapes free hand. However I was always disappointed by how boring the drawing capabilities of the tool were. I wanted there to be a more interesting background as well as an option to change the color of the lines being drawn. The simple blank slate background and grey “pen” were not cutting it. The interactive light painting gives these options. There is a specific painting image in addition to bright LED lights that can change color. The joystick allows the user to draw interesting patterns in various colors to light up different elements of the painting. My intention was that a child without particularly developed fine motor skills should be able to use the tool so it was purposely designed to be quite simple. All the user needs to do is start moving the joystick and press the button. I also wanted the canvas to be large to magnify the effect of the lights tracing different elements of the painting. I didn’t feel like this would be adequately accomplished with a smaller painting.
The painting itself is inspired by a memory I have from a school camping trip. I remember this image vividly because it was the first time I remember seeing stars and the moon while the sky was still pink, purple, and orange. I had no idea this was possible at the time and was really intrigued by how it could seem to be night time with stars in the sky, but still be relatively bright. Since the tool was designed to be used by children, I wanted to pick an image that reminded me of my own childhood curiosity. When speaking to my sister, she reminded me how I was particularly fixated on understanding how stars and sunset colors could exist at the same time in the sky so I decided to pick this image. In my painting, I purposely picked a color palette that is slightly too vibrant and bright to be real because this is how I remembered the image as a child. I wanted the painting to be warm and colorful rather than strictly realistic.
The biggest technical issues I had with this piece were with setting up the LED lights. I initially tried to use a grid of lights since this would have been easier and would have resulted in straighter lines of lights however I could not find a panel that was big enough for my large canvas. As such, I ended up using a long LED light strip however this made it hard to keep the lights straight and flat against the canvas and involved a significant time commitment to solder the various strips. The other challenges I faced mostly had to do with picking the appropriate amount of delay so that the light movement would be immediately responsive but not go too fast. I also experienced some technical issues with my ESP32 where it was unable to find the correct port which prevented me from uploading any new code until I was able to redownload the Arduino IDE and port driver.
Link to video: https://vimeo.com/824958022?share=copy. In this video the user is hiding behind the canvas for a more direct view of the light motion.
The other unanticipated issue was the time commitment to painting such a large canvas. In my initial timeline I expected to be done with the painting in 2 days and move onto the LED and joystick portion however given the size of the canvas it took much longer than I expected and also required more paint than I realized. I initially ran out of the acrylic paints I had but could not find the same set again and spent a few hours just mixing various paints to recreate the shades I was using previously.
Link to Github repository: https://github.com/tarabogavelli/creative_embedded_systems_final/blob/main/README.md