Aunisoma: Burning Man 2025
Perception
Our perception of reality is colored not only by our own emotions but through others and by the external world. How we understand something at one moment may not be the same in the next moment. We all live together in a multi-colored world that is often out of our control. This piece aims to embrace all that beautiful chaos of all these beautiful people into something to be celebrated, allowing ourselves to be curious, explore, and adapt to the ever-changing internal and external realities.
June 2025 - The project lives!
After a few tweaks to the firmware and software, the project is running nicely! I've run a battery test after writing some code to fake constant interactivity, and it ran for 12 hours continuously. That means the batteries will last overnight. So long as it doesn't rain, the solar panels will recharge the batteries during the day.
To-do list:
- Build the electronics mount boxes on top of the mounting panels
- Tear down the project to clean the metal stands, frames, and acrylic panels
- Replace worn seals on the panels
- Paint the frames with protective coating (prevent rust)
May 2025
- Enclosures have been drilled for cables and PIR sensors
- All controller boards have been installed in enclosures
- Weatherproof cable glands installed for power & comms in the enclosures
- Cat5 jacks installed and connected
- 24V cable runs soldered with connectors
- 3x power junction boxes built with bus bars and weatherproof connectors
- Initial lights-on test complete!
Electronics
Walter Smith has designed and built the panel controller boards that drive the LEDs. They use an ARM microcontroller to interpret a simple serial protocol to drive 3 MOSFETs for red, green, and blue at 24V.
I'm using the Adafruit Grand Central SAMD51 microcontroller on the Arduino platform to run the animation logic. Last night I was able to get the Grand Central talking to the controller board over Serial UART.
The panel controller boards talk to each other now over radio, which means less cable runs to connect and potentially more freedom in how the panels are laid out. There's also cat5 connectors for fallback in case there's too much radio noise.
Software & Electronics
For 2025, we're using new controller panels and radio. The protocol remains basically the same as 2023. The Grand Central calculates each panel's color based on all the sensor readings, telling the broadcast controller all the panel colors. The broadcast controller board then sends that information out to all the panels. Each panel controller board reads its color, sets the corresponding PWM for each color through the MOSFETs, and responds with its sensor values.
Structure
The panels use specialized acrylic that contains microscopic embedded reflective particles to disrupt the refracted light from the LEDs on the edge outwards, making the clear acrylic glow brightly. The acrylic is mounted in steel frames, which are mounted on steel stands that are bolted into the ground using 12" lag bolts.
The steel frames were fabricated by my neighbors Cyclefab at Equinox Studios and I welded the stands with guidance and help from my friend and professional metalworker Molly and Panda.