Programmable RGB LED Orb Tool for Light Painting Photography
Jun 11, 2012
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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You know what you get when you cross programming and photography? Kick bottoms light painting. A year ago today we featured Michael Ross’s (a.k.a. TxPilot) Digital Light Wand. It is a wonderful Arduino based tool that creates pictures in mid air.
Well, Michael is at it again. Yesterday Michael released his tutorial for a programmable Orb. (click here if you need an orb primer).
Similarly to the wand, the Programmable LED Orb Tool (o.k. you are PLOT from now on)… so similarly to the wand, the PLOT takes any bitmap or jpg image and converts it to a pattern that Arduino can understand. The method of using a jpeg to create the light pattern is just too awesome to be true and allows the creation of wonderful photographs.
The nice thing about it is that once you download the PC side software you don’t need any programming skills to load the Arduino. On the flip side, you need to know the spin speed to create accurate paintings.
My question is who will give this project speed sensing so it can make accurate pictures on without knowing the spin speed.
Here are some images of the PLOT and of the software used to mount the images.
[Programmable RGB LED Orb Tool Tutorial]
Udi Tirosh
Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.
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One response to “Programmable RGB LED Orb Tool for Light Painting Photography”
Michael, I was assigned the class project of making your Orb. Bought all the stuff you linked to and met with the partners in my group and we’re stuck on the Arduino Board Mega 2560. It says we’ve programed it properly but we can only get one light to light up (of 24). Went to the Arduino website and could not get it working after carefully following their steps.
I donated $22 to your cause via PayPal. Can you point me a direction? Steer me to an in depth link? I’m list and frustrated. I think I’m not connecting to the board correctly.