Our main source of inspiration for this project was the work of painter Josef Albers, specifically his series of square compositions. We loved the idea that a single composition could have a totally different feel depending on what colors we put into it.
So we got to work on making a piece with a similar composition to the Albers series. We wanted to make each square an offset piece of etched acrylic that would be lit up from underneath using Neopixels, creating some depth and variability in color. Nok and Hyunsu went off to cut some acrylic pieces, and I started laying out a pattern for the box to be cut on the CNC.
The pockets that were cut out of each side of this box should have been the exact right depth to contain our 4.5” x 4.5” acrylic sheets into a nice clean box. Unfortunately, I must have measured the thickness of our plywood inaccurately, because all of the pockets wound up a little too deep. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it did leave us in a position where we needed to do a bit of surgery after the fact to get everything to line up properly.
But of course, this whole thing doesn’t work if it doesn’t have lights. Thanks to a year and a half’s worth of ITP wizardry experience, this wasn’t the most complicated process. Three 10k potentiometers would work as our dials, and some Arduino code generously shared online by Paul Andrews allowed for the conversion of RGB to HSV.
So now we have 3 knobs to determine Hue, Saturation and value. We pulled our starting saturation value from the values in an Albers composition.
Now when we adjust our HSV, we still always wind up with a compelling Tetrad.
