Marc's Public Blog - Clubbing and Trance

Before the first day started, some locations had small markets where you could buy all the rave gear you could need, for those who didn't come prepared :)

and you could spend hours making your bracelets. I shouldn't make fun because I spent even more hours on my LED shirt :)

More rave gear on site if you needed it:

Getting to the festival grounds has become an increasing problem, moving almost 150,000 people to and from the racetrack in a 3H window, or so, has become a real challenge, despite huge amount of busses (the busses themselves had 3H-ish lines in some places).

those folks made full use of carpooling :)

Most people, including me, took shuttles, which took a reasonable enough 1H to get there and back, but they had stupid lines that could take up to 3H. The picture below is the best possible case scenario I saw one day I got lucky. Some people got close to passing out in the heat, and apparently one person died in line on the way back due to a medical issue that was not addressed timely enough :(
While Insomniac had plenty of busses, the loading was not streamlined enough and included a lot of unnecessary waits, making some lines ridiculously long. One day, I took another line to another hotel just so that I could get back to Vegas and then took a short cab back to my hotel:

Anyway, once arrived at the racetrack, things were good. Pictures of the grounds:

it looks less impresive during the day

sunrise coming

You could even get weddings:

Many carnival rides, but the lines were long at most of them0

And the ball pit was a fun place to relax :)

Pictures of people and signs:

bad ass tatoo

Other people were lit up, like me:

I remember this guy from last year, awesome costume and makeup

expensive triple row LED shoes

Fun signs:

damn straight!

haha!

This year definitely had a nice collection of art cars from burning man:

dancetronauts

nicely gave me a tour

Of course, EDC was about lots of great DJs, and lots of great DJs it was:

Armin

Day #2:

Ruben de Ronde played an awesome set

Tiesto was back, not playing Trance :)

Another solid set from Above and Beyond

Day #3 was sadly shorter for me, great lineup, but not enough sleep and I was too tired to enjoy the end:

PvD

After PvD, I lamed out, went back to the airport and flew back home to get some much needed sleep. I still had a great time despite this.

What insomniac needs to fix for next year:

What they did great:

So, this all started with some LED shoes I hacked to last 12H instead of 4, and it ended with me learning how to program arduino like microcontrollers to control neopixels (aka WS2811/WS2812/WS2812B) while being able to receive Infrared/IR commands. The latter is actually difficult but you go read that page to learn why

Since I've met plenty of people who complimented for my neopixel shirt and pants combo, and some who asked questions about them, I thought I'd write some quick page to explain how it all works and how you can do similar things, since it's more fun if I'm not the only one lit up at Dreamstate (which has been less of a problem at burning man).

Here is a video summary:

Show me the code!

So, I have 3 versions of the shirt, let's go through them depending on how complex you'd like to go:

Multi Color LED strip, non controllable

It used a 12V controllable dimmer: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHKCTLE which can simply change the brightness of the LEDs, which are of a set color. I bought the LED strip in Akihabara Japan, but I'm guessing something similar can be found elsewhere.

Tri Color Controllable LED strip

This version is better in that the LED strip has 3 channels, one for reach of Red, Green, and Blue. I uses a tri color controller like this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01410R4KS or remote controlled: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PBOJNZS
Those controllers can create any color and flash it at any interval, however:

ESP8266/Arduino Controlled Neopixels

To fix the issue of not being able to have custom multi color LED patterns, where each LED/pixel can be controlled separately, the solution is neopixels (aka WS2811/WS2812/WS2812B). Each LED/pixel is controllable separately, which is done by a computer, in this case the ESP8266 can run my own programs to control all the LEDs.
The ESP8266 is a 3.3V based microcontroller for low power use (good when battery powered) while the neopixels are 5V powered, but thankfully the neopixels can use 3.3V signalling from the ESP8266 while being 5V powered to light up properly. The one thing to keep in mind is that neopixels use some power even if they are not lit. In my case 200 neopixels, take about 120mA when they are off, and 4.5A when they are all lit in white on full brightness.

Neopixels are almost infinitely versatile, instead of having them in single line strips like on my shirt and pants, you can also make display matrices out of them:

I've then written code that receive the IR commands from the remote and execute different code that creates different light patterns, which is explained in more details and available on this page and you can get the code from github.

Here is a video that shows all 3 modes, jump to 3:50 for the neopixel bit: