A Year in the Life of a Tree
Interactive Mechatronic Art Exhibit
R. Davis Born • Isabelle Heye • Danning Sun • Matthew Miller
Nov 2016
Overview
This interactive mechatronic art exhibit pulsed with color until the start button was pressed, at which point a timer began sweeping through the seasons and the “experience” began. The user had 60 seconds to take the tree through a year of its life. This included growing spring leaves, turning them to red and orange in the fall, and covering them with snow and ice in the winter. The user could also impose weather on the tree. At the end of the 60-second year the art was replayed and the tree returned to standby mode.
Personal contributions
The team collectively designed and implemented the high-level state machine in C which ran the entire project on a TIVA launchpad. I also designed and implemented the hardware and software for the LEDs and their dynamic behavior.
The hardware consisted of 2 sets of 3 shift registers that operated 48 MOSFETs, which each switched power to 6 RGB LEDs. I wrote a low-level software interface to push data to the shift registers, and I wrote a higher-level service for a 24-bit software PWM on each set of shift registers. I wrote another still higher-level service to use these PWMs to generate a 27k-color LED display. I then wrote a state machine to implement the specific functionality required by this project into the system-level state machine. All circuit diagrams were prepared in Altium.
Results / celiverables
Fully automated, fully contained interactive art exhibit
Bill of materials showing adherence to $200 budget
Software design documents (pseudocode)
State-machine design documents (state transition diagrams)