Blog
Things I have written.
Phonic Bloom cover
Phonic Bloom works best when it’s in a dark space. I also wanted it to be waterproof and dust-proof, to protect the electronics. There, I needed to make a cover. I had previously made a cover out of duck cloth canvas for a friend’s smaller geodesic dome. I used Domerama’s cover pattern calculator to calculate the size of the triangular pieces, called gores, that I needed to cut. Then I sewed the pieces together on my home sewing machine. I don’t know why, but the cover I ended up with was about 60cm short on the bottom, so I had to add back some more canvas. If you’re doing this at home, I would recommend measuring your dome from the top to the bottom and checking, or just adding some extra length at the end of each gore. It’s much easier to remove canvas then add more on later.
Phonic Bloom dev log 3
I received the PCBs from JLCPCB and soldered one. It’s working well! Most of my recent work has been trying to speed up the framerate. Most of the CPU time was spent calculating the Fourier transform, so I focused on that. I was using the arduinoFFT library. That library defaults to double precision which is overkill when I’m only trying to turn on some LEDs, especialy considering that the LEDs only have 24-bit color. Also, the ESP32 only has a single precision FPU. I edited the library to make it use single precision, and it was much faster, but still not fast enough.
Phonic Bloom dev log 2
I brought Phonic Bloom to Boulder Decompression, a Burning Man after party. It wasn’t great - the LEDs did light up, but their frequency response was really noisy. I had some power distribution blocks right next to the breadboard Arduino at the top, and it was a big mess. A positive and negative wire accidentally touched once, blowing one fuse that I had to replace. On the plus side, it did light up, but it was mostly just used as a chill space.
Phonic Bloom dev log 1
My friend Joan made a project named Sound Puddle. It was a geodesic dome with a bunch of sound reactive LED strips. I helped her set it up at Apogaea a few times, and it was incredible, but it was also a huge pain. It was really big, so you needed a full crew and ladders and power tools to set it up. I wanted to recreate it in a smaller form, one that can be set up without ladders or other tools, that can fit in my car, and that can be set up in a few hours.