Budget Estimation
- Since the budget issue is the biggest problem in this project, estimating budget is a critical issue. We put pictures of LEDs on the pictures of Cooper building,and tried to estimate the budget as closely as possible based on that.
First, I made a CAD drawing file of the Cooper building, based on the real picture of the front view of the Cooper Union building. Based on this picture,
I could make the following CAD drawings of the facade of the Cooper building:
Next, Peter and I took pictures of IR LEDs at night to see how they really look like. We repeated this process several times, including ones with normal visible LEDs, superbright visible LEDs, and normal IR LEDs. The images used for budget estimation at the end, however, were pictures of superbright IR LEDs. Here are some pictures of the settings we made to take pictures:
Some pictures of actual circuit board and LEDs:
We surrounded the LEDs with the foil because the lights from the IR LEDs were too dim. Although seems crude, it actually worked. IR LEDs with the foil were a lot brighter than the ones without the foil.
Some experimental images with superbright visible LEDs…
Each red dot on the picture was consist of 4 and 2 superbright visible LEDs, respectively. They were so bright that we didn't need many LEDs for a pixel, even for pictures taken across the street.
IR LEDs, on the other hand, were incredibly dim, that we need way more LEDs just to see it across the street. From this image of 24 IR LEDs,
I cut out this pixel, and copied/pasted it on the Cooper CAD drawing. So each white dot on the following images is actually consist of 24 IR LEDs (around $8).
These are final mockup images. Each pixels are 10-pixel apart from each other for the left one, 15-pixel for the right one (I know, it's really hard to tell the difference through the screen). However, since IR LEDs are too dim and expensive to actually push this project, we doubted whether this project could come true. After talking with Tigerparty mentors and Professor Lima, we decided to give up actual proposal and thus the following budget estimation, and to focus more on actual prototype.
