Did some party light­ing for Ellen’s 18th last Thurs­day night. Just a bunch of bal­loons… with a twist. (Click for enlarged)

Yes, the twist is that they glow. Good times.

Not quite bright enough to pro­vide use­ful illu­mi­na­tion, but enough to be intrin­si­cally inter­est­ing & entertaining.

I was con­cerned about bat­tery life hold­ing out: I should have been con­cerned about get­ting larger-capacity bal­loons in order to achieve the buoy­ancy required. The bal­loons we had (all 11″ metal­lic) all flew ini­tially, when inflated to absolute-max capac­ity, but most of them were down within 5 hours. 14″ bal­loons prob­a­bly would’ve per­formed a lot bet­ter, but we’ll never know.

We also pol­ished off a CL tank (rated for 50 bal­loons) about two bal­loons from the end of the lot, so big­ger cir­cum­fer­ence would obvi­ously require a D tank.

Future enhance­ments: size, obvi­ously; dif­fer­ent LED hous­ing for wider light; magnetic/RFID switch­ing on LEDs (we were flick­ing them on at inflate time); and increased bright­ness to make them more effec­tive as light­ing, not just entertainment.

The direc­tion I’d ulti­mately like to take it is non-latex/heavy-duty inflat­a­bles with per­ma­nently installed LEDs + wire­less con­troller. At present it’s a tri-colour LED that auto­mat­i­cally cycles between the three sub-diodes (I sup­pose they’re three real diodes, but what­ever) that are RGB. I’d like to sep­a­rate that out into three 10k MCD diodes (for a peak 30k MCD out­put at ‘white’) and a recharge­able sup­ply… not quite sure what the best way to do that is. The inflat­able would prob­a­bly be about 15” with the lumi­naire (ide­ally) sus­pended in its cen­tre so it could be used as a non-lighter-than-air device and main­tain its effec­tive­ness as a light. Think really big beach balls.

I’m look­ing at get­ting a pre­fab Blue­tooth thing with an onboard micro­con­troller to man­age it… would also like to add a micro­phone in to make it audio-responsive with­out wire­less inter­ven­tion (because wire­less will suck lots more power, amongst other things). Blue­tooth would be utilised pri­mar­ily for fad­ing the fix­tures in and out rather than colour con­trol, though obvi­ously once one is in place it’s only a small step to intro­duce dis­creet faders for each colour channel.

All that said, I know noth­ing much about Blue­tooth. I’m look­ing at a Class 1 pre­fab board with a micro­con­troller which looks good, but is rather unchar­i­ta­bly priced at 79€ per unit, and the only pub­lished unit dis­count step is a measly 2€ at 10 units. That’d make the cost of these lit­tle mon­sters (con­troller, LEDs, power, what­ever funky kind of con­tainer I find for all of the things) at least AU$250/fixture after fund­ing devel­op­ment, which does seem like an awful lot! But if they’re recharge­able and can fly and stuff I think there’s a pos­si­bil­ity other peo­ple would buy them. On Thurs­day night a lot of peo­ple were pretty fas­ci­nated by them, even when they ended up on the floor.

Methinks I’ll try and build a cou­ple for myself before even think­ing about sell­ing them, and if that comes close to hap­pen­ing look at other wire­less options. I’m pic­tur­ing some­thing cool like walk­ing around a room with 100 of these things flown on the ceil­ing (either teth­ered together or helium filled) hold­ing a Bluetooth-capable PDA, the lights fol­low­ing you posi­tion. Processor-intensive signal-strength cal­cu­la­tions would be done on the PDA itself, which would arrange the sig­nals in a matrix and detect the near­est neigh­bour, set­ting its inten­sity (and the inten­sity of the sur­round­ing sig­nals) accord­ingly. There are other options, per­haps involv­ing W-DMX512, but that’d require a sep­a­rate micro­con­troller methinks.

Fun­nily enough, when look­ing through the wire­less DMX cat­a­logue for this year, it turns out the LD for Cirque du Soleil Delir­ium did basi­cally the exact same thing (Wire­less DMX + colour mix­ing RGB LEDs + 15” bal­loon)! Page 20 has an OEM TRX mod­ule in a 84x48mm form fac­tor, but it requires an exist­ing DMX inter­face. There’s an inte­grated device on page 15 that has a bat­tery enclosed also and sup­ports PoE, but it’s a bit big­ger (115x40x70mm) and sim­i­larly lacks the onboard micro­con­troller that the Blue­tooth device has.

The W-DMX might be bet­ter on power con­sump­tion, though, on account of the pos­si­bil­ity of receive-only mode that Blue­tooth lacks (though, of course, you can dis­able vis­i­bil­ity on Blue­tooth devices, which might assist). Both tech­nolo­gies use 2.4GHz spec­trum, which is pretty much all fun and unli­censed games.

Pos­si­bly more to come on this front if I can track down a suit­able con­tainer. I can shop for geek gear fairly effec­tively, but over­sized pieces of latex are a bit less my thing.

Com­ments re: ideas, criticism, etc., all quite welcome!