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Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN, this was my first art installation and boy was it a whopper. Used by tens of thousands of people in 8 days, it had 40 hand-made pulse sensors, 200 high current LEDs, and 40 5 meter LED strips. All running off an ATmega328p chip.

Would love to answer any questions on building art installations.

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Thank you so much for putting this post together. I was there and enjoyed it plenty. Its been a focus of a few discussions among friends back home in Bermuda.

This project was a pleasure to interact with -- definitely one of my highlights this year. Thanks! And thanks for the great write-up / open-sourcing.

I think my favorite part was how they looked from far away -- the pulsing up the stem to the lotus was a super pleasing animation.

Thanks for bringing this to the playa, Samuel. Hope to see it again next year!

Some of the pictures made this look completely surreal - like some kind of mystical garden inside a Mad Max movie.

Very cool stuff. Would love to see more of your work.

By the way I've shared with the unofficial Burning Man fb group https://www.facebook.com/groups/burntheman/permalink/1015458...

Neat, I had never heard of that group and then I noticed 21 of my FB friends are on it. Thanks for sharing!

...why would you make a Facebook group about this?

... to share snarky comments and bitch about things.

Why does anyone start a facebook group? what about BM makes it non-facebook-group friendly? There are a lot of loosely connect people that meet through BM or regionals, facebook is actually a pretty well-suited platform for discussion.

What did you do for solder paste? Seems like most places only sell it in large expensive quantities that have an expiration date.

Originally I bought leaded solder paste from McMaster Carr, but then I discovered a lead-free solder paste from Sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12878.

It's not as good as the leaded solder paste, but hey, no lead. Also, you should refridgerate it at all times. You don't have to, but it doesn't spread nearly as smoothly.

And I just used the credit card OSHStencils.com gives you with their film stencil. Works on QFN and other fine-pitch solder pads. Just gotta clean the excess solder off the film every 2-3 applications. Otherwise it blots and runs over the solder mask.

Cool, thanks. I have been using a standard chisel tip solder iron to do my .5 mm pitch components. It is doable after practice but it requires a flux pen and copper braid to make it work. Excited to see if the stencil hot plate method is easier.

You can buy reasonably small amounts of leaded solder of DigiKey. I would recommend it over SparkFun. That said, every solder paste has an expiration date and will go bad if not stored appropriately.

Thanks for building it! It worked great and I sat there with someone for a good 15-20 minutes playing with it :)

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