Hardware

Overview

The harsh environment of the Playa provides a difficult testing environment for electrical components. While the Power have historically been the most common failure, the compute hardware that drives the LED displays and Interactivity must also be very robust.

For 2013 to drive the LED strips, we designed boards based on the Teensy 3.1 and multiple bare BeagleBone Blacks running a very early version of LEDscape (using patterns written in processing and UDP to communicate to the four Blacks). The biggest problem that we ran into was instability in the long USB cables required to reach the different parts of the pyramid.

These were reused on the DEX for 2014, although the Connectors and old strips were problematic. The other problem is that the micro USB connectors on the teensy boards failed frequently by snapping off, so we can not recommend using them.

The 2014 frontage and Helios used an updated version of the software and a custom BeagleBone Black cape that used the PRU to drive up to 32 of the WS2812 strands. The patterns were written in ??? and communicated to the LEDscape controller with OPC over TCP.

Older Panasonic Toughbooks were used both years for various projects and are suitable if the entire stack is not pre-rendered or requires more CPU than the BeagleBone boards. Multiple CF-30 models were purchased for $200-$300 each.

Recomendations

• BeagleBone Black controllers, with custom capes
• ToughBooks