My boyfriend and I have been working on an art project for a while, and a few days ago we finally finished it! Naturally (since Emerick and I are both engineering students), an art project to us really means soldering circuits and coding microcontrollers to make blue electro luminescent wire (EL wire) light up randomly.
It’s dark so you can’t really see us but it’s us with the finished art project!
We started by soldering  Arduinos and Inverters together so that we could connect the EL wire to microcontrollers. After connecting the wires, we glued everything to a plank of wood. We soldered connections between the generator and all the microcontrollers, and also created connections between each of the Arduinos. We then programmed I2C protocol so that one master Arduino could communicate and control all the other Arduinos. We made the microcontroller make each of the pieces of EL wire light up randomly, and the result is pretty cool! We named it Blue Steel.
If you look at the top of the project you can see all our wires, inverters, microcontrollers, etc.
We hung it up today and now we just get to enjoy it! đŸ™‚ And hopefully get it put up during E-Week (the Engineering Week at Viterbi) and at the LA Art Walk. A friend of mine my roommate’s might even put it up at her art gallery!
