USB Disco Dance Floor

pi42 writes "Some MIT students built this USB controlled disco dance floor for their dorm lounge. It was built in a week, has 1536 LEDs, 20,000 hand-soldered connections, and is capable of displaying 12-bit color. Check out videos and photos." You can even send the floor an email, though it might not write back.

Comments

that's actually pretty cool.

[ABeowulfCluster]

It's actually worth it to click on the link to pictures in this story.

nice work boys, but...

[mezzman]

...someone else beat you to it:
http://www.lightspace.biz/

Re:nice work boys, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Lightspace(TM) patent pending technology"...

Whoops. :P

Re:low-res...

[PeDRoRist]

It says 30 FPS (and 4096 colors) on the front page.

Re:Movie is worth watching. 1 question

[Anonymous Coward]

The pressure sensors are still a work in progress. Everything in the video is computer controlled.

Re:Another one in process

[Anonymous Coward]

The sensors on this floor are bare wirecoils seperated with a few layers of plastic wrap. The resistance of the wrap drops dramatically under heavy pressure, but this was found out by simply experimenting with handy materials. See if you can find something better and more reliable (though you probably won't find anything cheaper!)

Re:Laser?

[FleaPlus]

How so? Lasers generally don't go through bodies very well. Maybe if you had a laser shining from below and had a translucent dance floor, but that actually seems more difficult than just using LEDs.

Actually, I suppose maybe the lasers could go through bodies, but then you'd have other problems to deal with.

Re:wow

[martingunnarsson]

They have a simple touch sensor under every tile, RTFA.

Re:ping dancefloor

[Anonymous Coward]

At least get the IP address right...18.x.x.x

Some clarifications and notes

[asoko]

I can't claim that I was a major player, but I did help with the driver and some visualizations for this thing. Just to clarify:

• The emails you send do not get displayed on the floor, in case you were wondering. Ddf is just the email list.
• The people dancing in the video are not at a party, but members of a theater group that were recuited after their performance to shoot the video. At parties it's much groovier.
• The tiles on the floor can be controlled in real time, and by either a standalone program or an XMMS plugin (a spectrum analyzer is working as of recently) And yes, it should be relatively trivial to program tetris for it, though it hasn't been done yet.
• Our inspirational song is "Work it" by Daft Punk.

Aaron S.

Re:Some clarifications and notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Good choice of song, good sir, but the full name for the track is:

"Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"

Amazing idea though, puts us lazy UK students to shame :)

Re:Another one in process

[dubbreak]

Depends if you want to detect pressure or just a depression (that the foot is down).. for ddr all you need to know is that a square is depressed in which case you can just have two contacts that are seperated then contact, therefore completing a circuit (most homemade ddr pads use weather stripping to hold the contacts appart).

This summer I'm making my own dance pad, A little googling on the subject will give you lots of good hits on people who have already done this.

If you want to detect ressure use FSR's, piezo's could also be used to detect velocity of strikes (the harder the strike the brighter the lights would be a neat effect).

Anyhow, just a few ideas for you.