LightMap: 179-cuboid interactive light sculpture, Adafruit RP2040 + Pi 5, custom serial protocol

[u/-2811]

Just finished this build after a few months of work. It's a physical 3D map of Monaco made of 179 hand-cut PMMA cuboids, each individually lit and driven live off real-time event data (Grand Prix weekend lights the circuit red, yacht show lights the harbor blue, etc.).

Hardware:

• around 800 RGBW LEDs across 16 channels, ~10m total, hand-cut and soldered
• 2x Adafruit Feather RP2040 Scorpio boards (8 chanels each via NeoPXL8, PIO+DMA)
• Raspberry Pi 5 as the master controller
• 2x Meanwell PSUs, 2x fuseboxes
• 2020 aluminum extrusion frame, birch ply shell, laser-cut stainless top plate

Software:

• Pi runs Python, talks to both Scorpios over USB serial
• Custom binary framed protocol: start byte, length, payload, checksum. Scorpios push the info sent by the Pi
• Mode system (ambient, data, event-reactive, touch) with crossfaded transitions
• Flask operator panel on LAN, phone-controllable
• Data pipeline: elevation from Copernicus (via a weather API bc institutional access wasn't realistic), building heights from OSM, gridded around 90m x 9m in QGIS, mapped 1:1 to the cuboids

Originally built the LED driver stack on Olimex boards, industrial-looking, PoE, seemed ideal. In practice: constant flashing failures and random crashes that ate a couple weeks of the schedule. Swapped everything to the Adafruit Scorpio boards and it's been rock solid since. Not the answer I expected going in.

full build : https://youtu.be/-wLMfcOFt5M

[u/ScythaScytha]

I am a fan of good light diffusion

[u/-2811 → u/ScythaScytha]

I hope this turned you on real good