Most recent weird project…. At some point I’ll do a talk on this, it will be called “Don’t set fire to the pop star”…
Video jacket for Lorde’s Ultrasound tour of US & Europe.
Insane timescale, about 8 weeks overall - couple for prototypes etc., but only 5 weeks from getting the final “go” to start building production hardware until the first tour date. We wanted to use flex but there just wasn’t the time. (We later did a flex version but the Artist preferred the industral look of the rigid PCBs)
About 80 16x24 LED panels, 3D printed covers to protect the LEDs.
Power from a 2Ah 18V DeWalt drill battery - we needed 15 amps for about 6 minutes, and due to time and safety concerns, battery and charger had to be off-the-shelf. The DeWalt was electrically ideal, but rather lumpy physically due to connector. Player/power module attaches to battery, splits & switches power, protected via TI TPS25982 E-fuse chips to six power+RS485 data connectors, to wiring stitched into jacket. The TI chips are awesome dead-short the output and they cut off in a couple of microseconds. 22AWG wiring on a drill battery would have been scary without this protection.
Six buses with 18V power+RS485, running 1.5Mbaud each for 20fps playback ( wanted to use 3Mbaud for 30FPS but that’s another story…).
Plays video content (uncompressed AVI - super easy to parse) from an SD card. Player based on 200MHz PIC32MZ, six soft UARTs using DMA. Uses a TCXO timebase so once triggered (manually by artist from prompt via in-ear monitors) it stays in sync with the show’s timecode.
LMK if you want more details….