A few weeks back a friend introduced us to the enigmatic DJ Schlaut. Turns out he was performing a gig that Saturday, and needed to get his old LED jacket up and running. He asked us if we’d be able to throw some animations on it. How hard could that be we thought - assuming this was a working outfit and we just had to do a little bit of coding to make it work. Oh how naive we were!…

Turns out the suit was in a sorry state, 4 panels of 16x16 WS2812 LEDs were attached with velcro to the jacket, along with a mess of wiring and a big old Arduino Uno connected to a 50W mains PSU….yes, mains.

We got our hands on the suit on Thursday night, so we had a few hours that evening, all of Friday night, and up until 7pm on Saturday to get the thing working again. This was going to be quite a task, but we were up for it…

Yes, once again I am continuing my theme of making things that glow.

Next weekend we’re having a big camp out with a whole bunch of people for my wifes birthday. We wanted to make a bit of an effort since so many people are coming along so we’re going to be carting out the Zen Ball table for everyone to gawp at.

But we also wanted to light up the surrounding camp a bit, and I happen to have a whole bunch of the old style 8mm WS2801 LEDs that happen to look waterproof enough to leave outside overnight while camping in the desert. So…how
to power them?

Now for the main event. We burnt a lot of time and energy trying to make a new art piece for this years burn.

Its been a while….it says on the strap line ‘infrequent blogger’…well one post every year seems to be more than I can manage at the moment.

Anyway, its time to share some blinky things from this years Burning Man!

First up, is our glowing bikes. This year we didn’t have much time for self decoration as we were working on our art installation, but we couldn’t go without getting a little bit glammed up so we threw this together for our bikes:

More photos after the break…

So last time I blogged about getting libcouchbase installed on an Elastic Beanstalk deployment. That was a major headscratching session there. After we got that working I had to move on to getting our EB configuration to deploy within a Virtual Private Cloud. This was a bit of a nightmare…