“State of Illumination” is the title of our first big public project. Danny and I had been wanting to do another project together (the first one was the acrylic lespecial sign), so we decided to apply to be installation artists at Casual Campout 2025, a local music festival. If you just want to see the finished product in action, click here to skip ahead.
Design & Construction
We settled pretty quickly on making something using the shape of North Carolina. Initially, we thought about Danny carving the words “Keep it Casual” into the middle of the sign and using silicone neon LED tubing, with similar neon tubing around the edge. We decided that would be a little too specific to one festival, we wanted to be able to use it again, perhaps at another local festival called The Big What?. So, we decided on using a matrix instead. Nervously, I created a quick mock-up in Photoshop, and we submitted our application.
After a couple nervous weeks, we were notified that our idea had been accepted! We were excited, but definitely nervous. The festival was about 2 months away, and there was a lot of work to do.
Danny got to work cutting out the sign and starting on the initial sanding, then Kim worked on painting it. We got together one evening and laid out the matrix grid, and drilled the holes. I think we did a surprisingly good job of laying the matrix out 😂
Next, we worked on attaching mending plates to the clips for the neon tube, and attaching the tube. I was also working on the lights… pulling the LED strip through the neon tube, soldering xConnect ends on everything, upgrading the controller, etc. Then came the blister-causing installation of 336 pixels to make a 28×12 matrix.
With everything pretty much finished, testing and programming began. I had about a month to create as much content as I could. I quickly realized my DigQuad wasn’t the right controller for this job, so I used a Raspberry Pi 3B I had around, and bought a Falcon PiCap V2. The Pi runs the FalconPlayer server and plays all the content I was creating using xLights.
I ended up with 115 sequences, for a total of almost 90 minutes of content. In addition to the “cool-looking” sequences, I created ones that were based on lyrics from some of the bands playing at the festival, some PSA type of messages, about a dozen dad jokes, and tried to list times for some of the events. I had initially wanted to have it play “Coming up next” or “Now playing” type of messages for the music all weekend, but schedules tend to slip a little, and I didn’t want to have to keep up with the scheduling all weekend.
The festival
To mount it, we used parts from an old plasma TV flat wall mount that was going in the trash. We installed 2 8′ steel T-posts, and basically hung the mount on them, with everything secured with some additional screws and zip-ties. It survived a pretty bad storm on night zero of the festival that had some very high winds. We were given a really great spot to set it up, right along the main path that went from the camping/vendor area down to the stage area.
Overall, I think everything went really great. Definitely learned some lessons for next time, but everyone seemed to enjoy it and had positive feedback. We can’t wait to set it up again (maybe in August)!
Here’s some photos and videos of it in action during the festival. It was surprisingly hard to get good photos and video of it 😂
Parts Used
- 3/4″ sheet of plywood
- 5V WS2812B ECO IP65 60/M LED strip (approx 4.5m, 276 LEDs total)
- 5V WS2811 Pixel strings (total = 336 pixels)
- Silicone neon LED tube, form T1023
- Clips for T1023 neon LED tube
- Meanwell 40A 5V power supply
- Raspberry Pi 3B
- Falcon PiCap V2
- Various xConnect pigtails, extensions, and power-injection tees
- Various mending plates 16mm wide
- #8 x 1/2″ Screws (for attaching the mending plates to the sign)
- M3 x 6mm bolts, with washers and M3 locking nuts (for attaching the mending plates to the tube clips)