[Lab] Firefly Pendant Project

[Mark Stephenson]

Hi, in the spirit of the what are you working on thread I thought I'd
share a project that fellow ArtEngine ModLab'ers Michael Grant, Darcy
White and I (Mark) have been working away on over the last few months.
Some of you may remember talk about wanting to do a more ambitious
badge project after the simple illuminated ones made last year for
Nuit Blanche. Well that is what we're working towards, but it's
evolved since.

We're calling the project Firefly and it's under the banner of
Lumipendant as we may do some more of these projects should this one
work out well.

The Firefly project is a larger scale social one where participants
wear a pendant that can interact with other pendants. Each pendant has
IR and LED lights on them and they act like little fireflies.

There is a game in all this it's not just a light show. Can you keep
your fireflies alive? will they flourish into a frenzy of colour or
wither away over the course of the event. Meet other badges, shake
your badge awake, checkin and stations unlock colours and behaviors.
We even hope to have a disruptive element. Afterwards you sync your
pendant and find out what kind of social firefly you were.

Out intent is to open source the software and possibly the hardware as
well. It's all built on Arduino, in fact the badges are completely
programable and hackable afterwards which is part of the overall
intent. We want to help inspire and foster more makers in Ottawa.

We're now shifting towards exposing more and more of the project to
the community. We still have lots of work to do and want to share and
solicit help wherever we can.

We submitted this to Nuit Blanche Ottawa+Gatineau this year so if it's
approved we'll be looking for some sponsorship to help cover the
components costs so we can distribute pendants and little to no cost.
Please let me know if you have some ideas.

Here is a link to our brand new Lumipendant places, please go, visit
and pass along some Ottawa maker love:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lumipendant

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lumipendant

Web site:  http://www.lumipendant.com/


Cheers,
Mark


--
Mark Stephenson
mark.b.stephenson at gmail.com | m: 613-797-7192 |  t: @mste
http://tumblr.markbstephenson.com | http://ca.linkedin.com/in/markstephenson