Help
I ve installed a 90A car battery in the dress (yes it goes on wheel), about 50 12 volts halogen lamps were installed in the "tentacles" of the dress, the lamps were divided in 24 groups, each group was wired to a power transistor 2n3055, each 2n3055 to a 2n2222 then into a DOUT pin.
I used very basic C app that responded to MIDI notes sent by Ableton, i mixed the 3 minutes music for the show so i created a MIDI file/pattern to synch the lights with the music.
To overcome the problem of having to start the MIDI file in Ableton at a given time (ie when the guys at the mixer started the music) i decided to go wireless with a Wiimote to start Ableton (via a little program called Osculator), another issue was to eventually adjust the lights to the music in case i didn t start it at the right time so i wrote a little PureData patch that let me use 2 buttons on the wiimote to speed up or down the tempo in Ableton.
I also used PureData to prototype and "virtualize" the dress appearance before hand when it was not build yet, so i could start programming the lights.
The sad note is that i got hold of lamps and transistor about 36 hours before the show so i had no the time to wire them up correctly, that is although the lights were synchronised all the nice left to right up-down movements were lost for a more "randomized" effect, i hope i can get hold of some vid soon.
Special thanks to Stryd (C advise), Nils (material forwarding), Lucem and Philtaylor (DOUT-power transistor circuit)... and TK! oh well and Lourdes who carried around the over 300 Kg carnival dress without a itch.
Simone
..you can actually see me dressed in black, short sleeves in the left side background, holding the wiimote ;)
