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USB Disco Dance Floor

Posted by timothy on from the know-how-to-party dept.

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.

5 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. nice work boys, but... by mezzman · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. Re:low-res... by PeDRoRist · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --

    Anything you do can get you slashdotted, including nothing.
  3. Re:Another one in process by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!)

  4. Re:wow by martingunnarsson · · Score: 3, Informative

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

    --
    Martin
  5. Some clarifications and notes by asoko · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    --
    The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey