If you’ve ever watched the Times Square Ball drop on New Year’s Eve with its many LED lights and patterns, you’ve seen the work of Chuck Sommerville, a longtime game designer and LED artist based in Folsom, California. His Penrose Tile Wall is accessible throughout the year, and has exhibited at Burning Man and last year at Maker Faire Bay Area.
Measuring 18×9 feet, each of its 900 diamond-shaped “cells” contains two lighting modules with three 12V LEDs each. The “backplane” wall itself is mounted to a steel Unistrut framework. Sommerville crafted the 18-piece backplane out of melamine with the help of a team of friends. They used a CNC machine to cut the holes for the LED modules, the slots for the cell dividers, and the dividers themselves out of melamine as well to maximize the light output. Finally, they used a fabric found in stretched fabric ceilings as an outer diffusing cover glued on top.
To animate the LEDs, Somerville primarily uses the game development engine Unity 3D for modeling and developing the animation content; the patterns displayed by the Penrose tilings are quite literally infinite. “The animations are generated in real time mostly using math. I also spend a lot of time studying the geometry of whatever piece I’m working on to bring that beauty of that natural form out. For the tile wall, I created a database with lots of information about each tile, such as position, shape, orientation, a list of neighbor tiles, and what interesting shapes the tile is a part of.”
Photos by Keith Hammond
For those interested in beginning their own journey with LED art, Sommerville warns that his work is unlike most mainstream animation. “It’s not a playback system like used in lighting your house with Christmas lights. All the animations are generated in code in real time. Since I used Unity, I write in C#. If you want to get started with something a little more entry level, check out a product called Pixelblaze. It allows you to create new animations in code using something like JavaScript.”
You can see more of Sommerville’s work by following him on Facebook and YouTube.
This article appeared in Make: Vol 92.
