We’d love to see this project continued, and it has been documented for anyone who wishes to do so. The video ends on a call to action: due to moving out, was unable to continue the project but has done much of the necessary legwork. The driver electronics were also slickly executed, with custom rack-mount units created to integrate with the DragonFrame controller used for the animation. We’d have been tempted to buy a 3D printer and hack it for this purpose, but did a fantastic job on the mechanical build, gaining a solidly constructed gantry with a large range. The gantry which carried the main LED was hand-made. To accommodate smooth sliding camera movements during the animation, a motion controller add-on was also written. Thanks to its open source nature, Python Blender add-ons were written to create light paths and convert them into an efficient sequence that could be executed by the hardware. The first step was to export the animations out of Blender. This project is the culmination of a lot of software, electronic and mechanical work, all coming together under tight tolerances, and ’s skill really shines. An animation is created in Blender then each frame is automatically exported and traced out by an RGB LED on a 3D gantry. ![]() has done just that, by creating a process which allows animations formed in Blender to be traced out in 3D as light paintings. This is pretty hard to do when moving a light around by hand: it’s mostly guesswork, as it’s difficult to see the results of your efforts until after the photo has been taken. But what if you could make the patterns really precise? What if you could model them in 3D? Whilst most light paintings are single shots, some artists painstakingly create frame-by-frame animations. Light painting: there’s something that never gets old about waving lights around in a long exposure photo. This isn’t the first LED light stick we’ve seen, if you’re interested in such things. There aren’t currently too many galleries of DIY LED-enabled light paintings, but we’d love to see some custom modded light painting approaches in the future. Some future improvements planned for the project include TFT/OLED support, rainbow or color gradient patterns in the LEDs, and accelerometer or gyroscope support for supporting animation. Images are drawn from the bottom row to the top, so images have to be transformed before updating to the LED painter. The project uses the Adafruit NeoPixel, ArduinoJson, and Bodmer’s TFT_HX8357 libraries for implementing the BMP drawing code, which also allows for an image preview prior to uploading the code to the microcontroller. The settings for the number of LEDs, time for the image row, and STA/AP-mode for wireless connections are also set by the web interface. Images are stored internally in Flash memory and are uploaded through a web interface. It directly supports 24-bit BMP, with no conversion needed. The LED Lightpainter takes the Pixelstick a few notches lower for amateur photographers and hobbyists. Nevertheless, it’s a huge step up from waving around a flashlight with your friends. The equipment needed for setting up the light painting sticks runs in the order of hundreds, not to mention the professional camera and lenses needed. It’s actually based on the Pixelstick, a tool used by professional photographers for setting up animations and photorealism shots. This weekend project from uses an ESP8266-based microcontroller and an addressable WS2812-based LED strip to paint words or custom images in thin air. Light painting has long graced the portfolios of long-exposure photographers, but high resolution isn’t usually possible when you’re light painting with human subjects.
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