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THE
Case Study2023
THE CUBE
Inspired by the iconic EDM artist Deadmau5, one day I decided that I wanted to have a replica of The Cube at home. The result is my first large DIY project in many years. Full stac...
01OVERVIEW
Inspired by the iconic EDM artist Deadmau5, one day I decided that I wanted to have a replica of The Cube at home. The result is my first large DIY project in many years. Full stack from hardware to software to web and visualization using TouchDesigner.
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The real Deadmau5 Cube v3 in action live in ChicagoFIG. 01
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This was an absolute disaster project to start with because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But I started anyway and that was pretty much the definitive moment that I learned that I can do anything I put my mind to. I always thought I could figure things out, but this was the first time I realised I can't actually figure things out, that I have no clue. It reminded me that I have all the skills to actually solve problems that I don't know the solution to before I start, which makes starting new projects a lot more accessible now. The first thing was to figure out how to wire these things up and how to drive them.
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This was my first physical build of that class. It definitely wasn't pretty, but I hadn't learned to design my own 3D models yet in Fusion 360. Nor was I aware that I could easily mount all of this stuff to 20x20 aluminum extrusion profiles. So in the end it was just about making it work with what I had in order to build this thing.
Not too pretty but It workedFIG. 02
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The fun part was figuring out the software. And by that I mean figuring out the undocumented software required to drive the specialized cards in order to create the pixels in the places where I needed them. For this I was required to use so-called sender and receiver cards that I had no clue what they were, where they came from or what they were supposed to be used for. Nor was there any kind of documentation available. The only thing that I had to guide me were a few YouTube tutorials, but none of them were of any real help since I was not building a 60 feet by 20 feet display on Times Square. I was trying to make a little display in my office.
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Once I figured that out, things went a lot smoother as I had to figure out how to create the retroprojection render pipeline to turn a flat video stream into a 3D projection mapped image that is broadcast from the pixels on the RGB panels. The fun thing is that 12 years earlier, I was messing around in Cinema4D with projection mapping in 3D space so I knew the trick to make this work and given that abstract concepts are the same across industries and even software, this was fairly straight forward. Once I figured out that the key Ingredient for this was TouchDesigner (and I instantly fell in love btw), it was just a matter of time before I had things running correctly.
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TouchDeisnger flow to parse streams into Cube mode or Panel mode
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Behind the scenes we are running a web server that allows for communication through MQTT and WebSocket to both the cube internals and touch designer and to the home network where it is able to communicate and control and be controlled by a Home Assistant and Google Home etc.