The HackClub cloud

So we’ve unpaked everything from the ClayHaul and asseced the damage on the led wall. And oh boy all the pillow fill fell from it. So after more figuring out from where to get spray adhereve it turned out that it was in a repair booth, how convinient.
Also like a lot of solder connections were tore up from the transport so I’ve repaired those, glued on the pillow fill and it worked great!!
Oh yeah and then Gwendal figured out how to play games on the matrix with wled!!!!

Allright so after that mess we’ve locked in hard. While my temate was repairing her project (She did that for almost the whole hackathon, which is crazy). I began soldering and gluing on the LED strips. Then remembered that it would be great to screw in the screws (With the DIY shitty screwdriver), resumed work on the LED strips.
Allright and now we have around two hours left. After everything was soldered I’ve turned it on and it didn’t work. First there were problems with WLED configuration and then with one segment that was dead. Soooo after a “quick hour fix” The LED matrix was working.
But we still have just a hour left to ship it. So I’ve quickly done some plywood gymnastic with spare people and put the whole contraption on chairs screwed in the legs and stood it up. Oh yeah it was working!!!!!
OH no my teamate was still working on her project, so we needed to pivot. I had prepaired the repo for shipping while she sprayed adhesive on the board and glued the pillow fluff on. It was a messs. But we managed to do it in time lol.
After that we had a short visit from our favorite creators, packed everything and went partying! They even had a B-day cake for me how lovely! Thank y’all!
Here is a little video we’ve filmed.

PS: I didn’t take a photo of the final build as I was so bussy!!!!

So this day was spent by asking people around if we can PAINT!
I thought we can atlest do some things that are not really needed but there wasn’t much though. So the whole morning was spent asking if we can paint as it was promised to happen now, but everytime I was told off. So I’ve procrastinated instead with talking to people lol.

After it we all went on a picnic and we got back by around 4 pm.

Allright no more staling we have layed down the OBS boards and began gluing on the led strips which we have precut yeasterday.
And while gluing on the strips I went to another round of asking around for a saw, but this time dhamari helped me soooo much!!! <3

So after yesterdays pain with a small metal saw I’ve managed to borrowed a great stanley saw from a framing shop nextdoor. Nice!!

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh so I’ve finally managed to cut down the wood.
Oh also we don’t have a scredriver so we’ve made our own scrappy one.

Mys first task was finding a teamate in which I failed horibly as I wasn’t able fo find anyone. I’m normaly social but it was different here as I was speaking a different language, and just a lot of first times (USA, Solo flight, long haul flight, hackathon, new people, different culture) … yeah it was overwhelming. And did I mention that I was on a family and frinds gathering in the middle of novehwre!

So my plan was to when I land go to lowes and bring back all the stuff needed with yaha, but by the time I’ve came from the airport I wouldn’t have enough time to make it in time for the opening ceremony. So yaha came there by himself, picked up and rode it in an uber - just in time nice!!!!

Also my plan was to spray paint the OSB light blue at lowes but that didn’t happen so I’ve bugged staff for the whole evening if there is a place that we can paint it, I weren’t to a more disorganized even in my whole life! It was chaos on all fronts.

So after a bit of setup I had like 18hr traveling to the venue. The leg to Frankfurt was great but the flight to San Francisco was super long and I didn’t know what to do. But in the last two hours of flight I’ve remembered that I need to finish the animations for the LED matrix. ’*sad

After shipping yesterday I had today started working on riping
TwinkleTron out of my table, and overwriting it with the latest FW.
Then I began configuring it.
I have set up the LED strip channels as one can only do 800 LED’s
reliably. It was split in the middle by 576 pixels.
After I peeked into the matrix config set up the defined matrix size and
it didn’t look right. Went to readme to spot the mistake ant it was
because I’ve wrongly converted from mm to cm. OR so I thought. It was
the whole calculation that was wrong. 🤦‍♂️
MATHS

Boink I got an notification that my ship was rejected and needs changes.
(No images in readme and no BOM)

Back to the project, and after a few blank stares into the readme and
also the CAD file I’ve managed to at least hopefully correctly calculate
the needed LEDs. SO I had to redesign the power delivery section.
Updated the repo for requested changes and shipped it back out.

PS: I also managed to get the price down :yay

Allright I’m almost finished!!

So first thing I did today was cleaning up the repo and pushing the yesterdays changes.
Then I went on to do the drawing of the stand that will hold the LED matrix, I’ve tried to even show the LED strips in there but FreeCAD couldn’t handle it, so I sketched it up in draw.IO. with a kinda like a block diagram.

Wrote about the intended SW in the readme.

And then I’ve created the vision board so anybody can get the idea about the project, which is going to get shipped as a demo

The whole time I was thinking about how I’ll create a render in blender for it with cloud simulation, but it didn’t work yesterday. But I got inspiration from some YT video that mocked it up with photoshop. So I hopped into affinity and started designing after a tutorial which I couldn’t follow, so I’ve found an online texture export and inported it into affinity tweaked it and it worked.
But then I need some kind of backgroud for it, so I took akemi from the WLED effects website and blurred it out behind the cloud layer. Yeah it didn’t look right. And ChatGPT halucinated completly different thing. But after a bit of tweaking I managed to make it work.

And after all of that I have threw everything into the shipping baskets, wrote down the price. And going to ship soon …. Good luck

Today I had done the schematic.
It’s going to be a pretty interesting concept as the wiring is wild different to other matricies.

We need almost 120m of LED strips. And they are going to draw almost 2 000W. It’s going to be an electric kettle lol.
Because of that I have added two power cables to power the thing, as 220V is better for this. *laughs in geman.

I have started creating the schematic in DrawIO. First was the PSU along with the two heavy duty cables I’ve mentioned earlier. Then it’s going to WAGO connectors which will be our power distribution and then it’s going to be distributed to the LED power injection points.
Next I did a block diagram in it for the LED matrix, but it wasn’t really clear how to connect it up so I’ve hopped into tinkercad and did a small scale schematic with all of the right features.

Next up is:

• Doing drawings of the the LED strip placement and / adding the 2x4 supports as well as the PSUs
• Ask my brother if he can try to visualize it in blender
• Create instructions for building at outpost or at home lol

So after that last pivot I’m super happy how this project is turning out. I hope that other people loves it as much as I do.

But firstly I wanted to move the repo as the original is getting cluttered and it’s a mess. so new repo it it. And it’s also getting a rebrand from generic MatrixShow it’s going to be called The Hack Club cloud, symbolizing the many great ideas of Hack Clubbers. Well this one isn’t going to be about me it’s about ya’lls creativity passion and perseverance. And this sounds so epic in my head!

So after a bit of philosophy. I went to look for suitable LED strips they were either super expensive or didn’t meet my criteria. And after a while I was able to find them, neat!
So everything else was based around them, like the rows spacing, read more about that in my repo.
https://github.com/Tomas-Kuchta-FPV/The_Hack-Club_cloud/blob/main/readme.md#constraints

Alright and then I done the 3D model for the matrix.
Which turned out OK, but it’s looking too much technical, but I can make drawing for it that we’ll use when building.

Peace out Thomas

So I need to pivot as it’s going to be super expensive!

It’s going to be like 300 bulbs, which is feasible but it needs to be a huge budget. It would be fun thought, as I was on planning to use American electrical material. BTW I love the flat cables!

So at first I’ve pivoted to making a addressable LED Christmass string light matrix. So basically drill out thousand of holes and plop them in an interval of about 15cm, but that wouldn’t have the right WOW effect.

So there was another pivot to cheaper LED strips, which is doable!!!
So I’ve decided to make a 4x8ft cloud wall!! It’s going to be addresable and it will be driven by my custom WLED LED controller called TwinkleTron.
I still need to CAD it and spec the PSU, but it’s going to be awesome!!!!!!!

So I’ve defined BOM, and made a sketch of the matrix.

A halve a year ago I had a light exposition in my hometown which turned out very good.
So I want to use the current tested setup, which are Smart sonoff lightbulbs. So I’ve made a BOM around it. And CADed it. But when in CAD I’ve noticed that it’s like 300 smart bulbs and it’s going to be super expensive.

So after finding out that this route isn’t good I’m going for a WS2811 addressable lights.