Kinect to Grasshopper to Arduino to DMX (part 3)

This is an interactive light installation for the Arup office in Berlin. It was combined from different parts of excibitions we participated in (see also part 1 and part 2 on my channel). Now it is used as a gimmick to play around in the hallway of our office.
The person in front of the LED wall can walk along the white LED box to activate the LED stripes. The distance to the LED box controlls the colour of each activated stripe. If the person walks out of reach of the Kinect sensor (on the top left corner of the LED box), all stripes are being turned off from left to right.
The initial concept was developed for the Arup Penguin Pool exhibition on July 25th 2015 in Berlin to show how you can create interactive lights with available technology that react on the presence or movement of people. Our motivation was to save energy and to reduce light pollution in cities with this concept since it could be used for illuminated advertising or street lights.
To realise this project I connected the Xbox 360 3D sensor (Kinect) with Grasshopper for Rhino using the firefly kinect function. To address the DMX LED stripes I used the firefly serial write function in grasshopper to send values to an Arduino. On the Arduino I used parts of the tinkerit DmxSimple code with a conceptinetics DMX shield which is connected with the INSTA DMX-LEDTRIX Gateway to control the 30 LED stripes (INSTA DMX-LEDTRIX). Each of these LED stripes is separated in 5 segments which can be addressed over DMX separately.
www.arup.com/
www.insta.de/
www.fireflyexperiments.com/
www.grasshopper3d.com/
playground.arduino.cc/Learning...

[@hilman952]

nice, i want to ask something bout kinect model. are the kinect should be in specific model, or this would work with any model of kinect xbox ?

[@Hello.Henning]

+Hil Man , the firefly plugin for grasshopper works with the old kinect that I used, as well as with the new one. To connect it with your computer you have to buy a kinect power adapter though which provides the standard usb connector. You can get that adapter quite cheap on ebay or amazon. Just search for "kinect adapter" (It doesn't need to be the original one).

[@muskku]

Hello! first thanks for your work, people like you inspire me. I am studying gh to know its possibilities with arduino and kinect and I am investigating with firefly and kinect (quokka) to make interactive art installations. everything is going well at the moment in virtual but I can't get the correct code to get out dmx or ttl. Could I ask you some questions? thank you!

[@Hello.Henning]

Hi. Thanks for your appreciation. I enjoyed that project a lot but havent done anything similar afterwards so it is quite some time ago. But feel free to ask your questions and I will do my best to answer. Do you want to skype or zoom or just by e-mail? My e-mail address is [e-mail].