Pulsar is an interactive, persistence of vision machine designed and built with project partner Hedley Davis. Pulsar debuted at Burning Man 2010. Pulsar’s display consists of two four-inch spheres spinning at 2.5 rotations per second in a 10-foot diameter circle. Each sphere houses a cluster of RGB LEDs.
Input from the control panel is rendered into three separate images which can be overlaid one upon another. For each image, the user can adjust color (hue, saturation, brightness), luminosity, rotation, and various other effects such as zipper, mirror and fade. Once the combined images are rendered, the software creates a map of 1024 individual points around the diameter of the circle. That image profile is then sent to a custom hardware board that drives the LED modules via a custom slip ring.
Pulsar was inspired by a project called Space Painter created by Carl Pisaturo, who also taught me how to build a slip ring. Photo credits: Tom Stahl, Tim Smith & Douglass Hooper.
