In the previous articles we discussed a lot of the design and a little of the construction that went into making The·Grid, an art/engineering installation at EMF 2014. In this final article we'll talk about how it turned out and share a few of the many lessons we've learned.
It's easy for a description of the design of a project to make it sound awfully organised. We even prepared a Gantt chart of our planned construction and development timing, but that quite quickly diverged from reality when we had to work on our actual degrees. The majority of physical construction occurred painfully quickly in the two weeks before the event, and a large part of software development took place during the event itself (we passed this off as "Live Coding"!).
Lesson 1: Construction/implementation takes a lot longer than you think, and will start later than you think.
Lesson 2: Software might sometimes be easier to tinker with than hardware, but it still takes an awfully long time to get right.
We did, eventually, get all the pre-event preparation done. With a living room covered in tiny bits of cable, an incredible length of solder consumed, and cable strippers all but worn out, the next hurdle was set-up. We had a perfect plan: set off in the morning, arrive around lunch time, set up during the afternoon, be home for dinner. Easy as that.
Instead we woke up around lunch time and started frantically packing the entire thing into the car. Which took hours, of course, so by the time we were setting off we were well into the afternoon. Not deterred, we continued writing the software while crammed into a tiny Yaris driving down to Milton Keynes.
By the time we found our way to the EMF site, it was almost sunset! Not yet discouraged we set about putting up the control tent and unboxed all 49 reels (plus spares!) of LED strip and bundled cable. Once it started getting dark we stuck torches to our heads and pressed on. With the control tent pitched (this took a bizarrely long time) we laid out the 7x7 grid on the stubble field that was to become home for the next few days. At 20:34 we broke ground for the first time, now well into the dark
Lesson 3: If you buy a tent for £10, you will not enjoy putting it up. Duct tape may be required.
The constant drizzle sapped our will and body heat but we persevered. Around 2AM some of the EMF admin team popped by to say hello and let us know that we had to leave now or be locked in until daytime. We didn't exactly have a choice! Restored by some hot coffee and joined by the amazingly helpful Fligg (thanks again!), we set about with renewed gusto and the helpful addition of a flood light! Finally by 6AM we had assembled 49 poles and pushed them into the ground in a reasonably neat grid. Almost done, and only twelve hours behind "schedule".
Lesson 4: Avoid doing many hours of manual labour outside, in the dark, in the cold, while it's raining.
Lesson 5: Inserting angle section 50cm into the ground is surprisingly difficult. Especially when the ground contains residual crops.
With the hardware mostly set up (though we'd eventually have to recruit help to dig in all 600m of cable) we had a quick test. Everything lit up! Every pole was perfect. We were so relieved. I collapsed into the control tent... and opened up my laptop to continue coding.
Eventually the front gates were unlocked and we returned home around lunch time, almost a day after we'd set off, tired and hungry and happy. Just long enough to get a final good night's sleep and prepare for EMF itself the next day.
We won't go into too much detail about EMF itself here, beyond mentioning that it was a spectacular weekend and you should definitely consider going when it's back in 2016. I spent a lot of the weekend sitting by the control tent with my laptop and a hip flask of whisky, sorting out the computer vision interaction system. While we had the basic patterns working well from day 1, the computer vision proved a lot trickier. Another week of solid work might have cracked it, but with the time I had we managed to implement the simple motion detecting system that allowed it to light up the poles nearest people in The Grid. While pretty simple this did mean we could run through The Grid and have it light up all around us, slowly clicking off behind. Hopefully next time the dreams of interactive mazes and multiplayer games can be realised!
Then there was teardown... which we can honestly barely remember. Safe to say we got home eventually and left behind nothing but some very illuminated memories!
Thanks again to Element 14 for sponsoring the electronics running The Grid, and to EMF for allowing us to set up this crazy thing in the first place! And thanks to you for reading through this build log, we hope you've found it enjoyable.
There are lots more photos and videos scattered around our Twitter account.