Patternflood

A four-knob LED instrument: a 256 mm square of 128 × 128 pixels in a laser-cut birch box, made to be played. Turn the knobs and the patterns answer. There are toys, games, generative art, music visualizers, and a TV that surfs very weird channels.

It is inspired by Patternflow, an open-source LED synthesizer by SeungHun Lee, and it runs every one of Patternflow's patterns, along with the ones its community has shared.

Five of our demos, straight from the renderer with nobody at the knobs: Solo Jazz, Obra, Riso, Valley and Sea.

Display	4 × P2 64 × 64 GOB panels, 2 × 2: 128 × 128 px, 256 × 256 mm
Controls	4 lit push-knobs (Adafruit 4991 I²C encoders), 4 push buttons
Brains	Raspberry Pi 5 renders; a Colorlight 5A-75B with open receiver75 gateware drives the panels
Power	Mains in, Mean Well LRS-50-5 inside, current-capped per frame
Box	3 mm Baltic birch, finger-jointed and laminated, 293 × 373 × 61 mm, etched with generated circuit-board art
Software	92 demos of our own, all of Patternflow's patterns, and the Patternflow community's, compiled and run natively on the Pi

Status: the desktop build is complete. Two revisions have been built, and Rev 2.7 is the current one.

Rev 1, plain and single-sheet; Rev 2.7, laminated and etched, with buttons; the boot splash.

A second, wall-sized project is at the concept stage (below).

On the box's network, http://patternflood.local/ is a web remote: the panel live, the knobs and buttons, and every shelf of patterns, from a phone.

Build one

docs/desktop/BUILD.md is the build guide: the parts list, flashing the Colorlight card, the Pi image, test cuts, cutting the box, glue-up, wiring and first power-up. Everything it needs is in this repository: the Onshape FeatureScript model, the cut sheets, the gateware and the software. The model itself is public on Onshape: Patternflood desktop in Onshape.

docs/desktop/ has the reference docs and the design notes behind the build.

Try the software without the hardware

The demos run on any Linux machine with Python 3 and numpy (and Pillow, for text), and can write an animated GIF instead of driving panels:

cd firmware/demos
./run.py --list
./run.py --demo etch --knobs auto --out preview:/tmp/etch.gif --seconds 8

--knobs auto is a random player turning the knobs. Upstream Patternflow's patterns also need g++ and a clone of upstream in upstream/ (firmware/demos/README.md).

Repository layout

docs/desktop/          the desktop build: build guide, wiring, design notes
docs/wall/             the wall project (concept)
hardware/cad/          Onshape FeatureScript, export and art tools, vendor STEP models
hardware/laser/        cut files: one DXF per part, nested sheets, test cuts, diffusers
hardware/REVISIONS.md  what changed in each revision
firmware/demos/        the demos and the renderer (Python; runs on the Pi or a PC)
firmware/pi-controller/  the Raspberry Pi appliance image: provisioning, services, boot splash
firmware/colorlight/   the Colorlight card: JTAG tools, receiver75 build, frame protocol
firmware/knob_bridge/  a FeatherS3 that reads the knobs over USB, for bench work
firmware/patches/      the abandoned ESP32 / Matrix Portal fork of upstream
upstream/              a clone of upstream Patternflow (not in this repo; see .gitignore)

The wall project

A room-sized LED wall (nine P3 panels, 576 mm square) that responds to the people in front of it through a VL53L9CX depth sensor rather than knobs. It shares the inspiration but not the code or the parts. It is a concept until the sensor arrives: docs/wall/.

Credits

• Patternflow by SeungHun Lee: the idea, the instrument's feel, and the patterns this box runs. Its community's patterns come from community.patternflow.work, each credited to its author on the panel.
• receiver75 by Jim Bailey: the open gateware for the Colorlight card (MIT).
• Sequoia Fabrica, the community makerspace where much of this box was made: fertile ground for creative fabrication and artful programming.
• Vendor CAD models from Adafruit and Mean Well (hardware/cad/vendor/).
• JetBrains Mono for the etched lettering (SIL OFL 1.1).
• The Interdimensional Cable shelf's tapes are cut from public-domain films on the Internet Archive, and its news ticker reads headlines from The Onion, credited on screen.

License

• Code (firmware/, hardware/cad/tools/, the FeatureScript): MIT.
• Hardware design and documentation (the model, cut files, art, docs/): CC BY-SA 4.0. Share alike: if you publish a modified box, publish its files under the same terms.

Third-party pieces keep their own licenses: receiver75 (MIT, firmware/colorlight/receiver75/LICENSE), JetBrains Mono (OFL, hardware/cad/tools/fonts/OFL.txt), the vendor STEP models (hardware/cad/vendor/README.md), and the ported Patternflow and community patterns, which are CC BY-SA 4.0 with their authors' credits in each file's header.