RedBullCreation2013

Red Bull Creation 2013 - K-LUG Participation

In April 2013, several K-Luger's were accepted for the Red Bull Creation 2013 maker challenge http://creation.redbullusa.com/

Tim, Pete, Matt, Will, Jon G, Jon T have been hacking away for several days on their top secret "Let There Be Light" project...The project was submitted in just in time and our entry is here: http://youtu.be/9SB-FD13yPs

You can see other entries and vote (for us :-) ) here: redbull.com/creation

Our project is an Interactive Rock Wall Climbing machine powered by a Linux PC an Arduino UNO and a "TurBULL Encabulator". The Wall-O-Tron features an 18x16 climbing grid with 288 touch sensitive holds, and 324 embedded route LEDs and 36 Cardlets. The Marquee features hot-wire crafted foam letters lit by 5 meters of RGB LED light strips and a scrolling scoreboard display created from 5 digitally addressable, 300 RGB LED strips. (We got the TurBull Encabulator (an Arduino shield) and 6 meters of LEDs from Red Bull...we purchased another 4 digitally addressable LEDs from Adafruit)

The Arduino controls the Wall o Tron sign lights. Since there are eight different channels on the Encabulator, we can have 8 different colors going and so the letters are on channels in order and start over again starting with the R (ie so W and R are on the same channel and A and L are on the same channel) The Arduino also puts letters and numbers on the LED Scrolling light board ...an interesting programing challenge since the LEDs are from 0-59 and then the 2nd row is 69-119 etc But we can put letters and numbers out in any position on the board with or without clearing and in any color and with or without scrolling animation. The Arduino and the Sensors both go over Serial communication, so there are 2 usb to serial connections from the pc. PC code is written in Perl and Arduino.

The game we coded is called Wall Sweeper. There are LEDs around each rock (most have 4 around them except for left and right edge rocks). A Goal rock lights up by flashing green LEDs around the rock. The climber traverses to the Goal Rock and it turns off and a new Goal rock appears. A red Hot Rock may also appear and never go away...so the Climber has to be more and more careful with each traverse. Score is based on the number of traverses the climber can do. A timer may be added in the future. Many additional games have been proposed. Record Playback of routes, HORSE type of game for 2 or more players, Jailbreak where a beam of red rocks sweeps back and forth, there will be versions of the games for younger and less experienced climbers where only the lower level lights are used and one last game suggested is Frogger!

Thanks to the Red Bull Creation 2013 and Team Rabbit-Hole, climbers of all ages at the Prairie Walls Climbing Gym in Rochester, Minnesota are enjoying games like "Wall Sweeper". Many more games coming soon. (http://prairiewalls.com/)

Tons of Timelapse footage of the entire build all munged together here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8l5Tp2Ciog

Some hints about our project were sent out on Twitter and You Tube

Details on the contest: The TurBull Encabulator has now reached a high level of development, and is successfully being used in the operation of controllable LED lighting art and nofertrunions. The only principals involved for the qualifier are as follows 1. You must use interactive lighting to create something awesome, and 2. You must upload a video (up to 3 minutes long) about what you made by May 5th 11:59PM PST.