Beacon4

Beacon4 will be the fourth incarnation of the flagpole beacon, for Burning Man 2012. This year the plan is to take a different approach, and light the entire scaffold tower rather than just a beacon on top of the flagpole.

Project Status

• 2012-04-24: Permission received!
• 2012-04-23: Requested permission from NeonBunny to attach LEDs to the tower.
• 2012-04-22: Started putting together idea.

Ideas/Plans

• Main idea is to cover most of the scaffold tower in addressable LED strips, driven by one or more StrichLux modules
• Art-Net will be used between the controller and the StrichLux driver box/translation engine
  • Backup plan is to have a USB hub and one OpenDMX USB interface per universe, driving the StrichLux boxes via IO-DMX input modules
  • IO-DMX input module could be brought along either way and swapped in if someone wants to manually control the "display"
• BeagleBone is being looked at to control the whole display
  • <1W idle, 1.75W full load
  • Comes with onboard Ethernet
• Need to find a fanless very low power 4 or 5 port Ethernet switch
  • Allied Telesis AT-FS705LE V5 might work, it's rugged, low power, and cheap

System Components

• BeagleBone (controller)
• 4-port fanless Ethernet switch
• 1 or 2 StrichLux boxes (transform engine/protocol converter)
  • 1x IO-ArtNet
  • 4x IO-SPI
• Many LED strips (need to work out dimensions)
• Power setup (need to work out power details)
• Debugging terminal (XO-1?)