alt Hacker NewsPhyllotaxis: An audio-reactive LED display
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Because I desperately want to make my own (and maybe modify it a bit to fit my own hardware biases), I found the repo for the hardware:
https://github.com/jagnat/fib_quintant_minimizer
It would be really neat if the author could put the relevant licensing stuff on there.
(but mainly, I want to hear about how they accomplished 5-fold symmetry!)
Cool! Remarkably similar to Voria Labs who produce a product called Lumanoi https://voria.com/
Perhaps an example of convergent evolution? :)
Love how the 5 PCBs slot into each other to form the final shape.
With respect to the assembly: do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs. With a simple bill of materials like this it will add very little cost, it saves you a _lot_ of time, and it might also reduce the chance of component damage from adding too much heat or from accidental ESD strikes. (I don’t know how much these Neopixels can handle, though.)
Well...
I bought one of those some time ago.
Might interest the HN crowd...
Neat trick to use mulberry paper under a clear printed part. I wonder if you could simulate stained glass like that.
This kind of audio visualization reminds me of the old Windows Media Player. I enjoyed watching it back when I was a kid.
Too bad. Software audio visualization's no longer common. But hey your hardware visualization's better than software! :D
I would love to know how the paper used as diffusor was fixed to the 3d model
Cool. CadQuery is perfect fit for such organic modeling. I wonder if there is anything similar for pcb design.
WLED on that would be awesome. Pop an esp32 and make a 2d map
Insanely cool and very well built! Natural patterns are a great basis for visuals
Always wanted to build something like this. The way the sound drives the phyllotaxis patterns is truly mesmerizing.
Very cool!! Love that it takes uploaded Wasm sketches, so people can contribute to it by writing their own patterns for it!
very nice+ I have a project on my "will i ever start this" list for putting this onto a sphere with integrated IMU/acc
Excellent choice in music for the demonstration.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/neon-pattern-drum/134973653...
You could make millions selling these to audiophiles.
Love it! I'm currently learning electronics (again, did some in high school) and this kind of project is really inspiring.
Thank you for sharing the build process.
Nice work. Love to see some vintage HN content
very inspiring. it's nice to see how an idea evolves from a though to a product / installation.
This is brilliant
very cool!
Phyllotaxis spirals (derived from the golden angle) make such an elegant coordinate space for radial audio visualization because they avoid the density distortion of concentric circular rings.
The trickiest part in these builds is usually balancing transient response with temporal smoothing so the LEDs don't devolve into jittery noise during busy frequency passages. Curious if you're doing per-bin decay filters on the FFT or handling dynamic gain normalization upstream?
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I don't like the word phyllotaxis.
I understand it was inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis, but arrangement on leaves serves the purpose of growth in a specific niche. The pattern arises because naturally leaves serve to capture light - see the images on wikipedia there. Phyllo means green. The LEDs used here do not really tap into any of that, and the name is also a misnomer. That's not good.
Very cool. 5-fold symmetry on the PCB to use up the board allowance is particularly neat.
A trick that poor hobbyists learn early on is to make pads a little larger than necessary for SMT parts so you've got somewhere to wick solder onto. Neopixels (5050 LEDs) are reasonable to hand-solder since the pads extend up the sides of the package, but you can also do QFNs with a bit of practice by placing a big via to get to the central pad from underneath.