Electric LED Surfboards?

[spacetime]

Sparr, Thank you for clarifiying that. I don't care what reddit does or doesn't do. I don't go there. I do care about misinformation. The Reddit page you posted isn't factual. Unless you have contacted BM and have more info than those 2 links, there is nothing there to substantiate banning them. Whoever posted that on Reddit should have done their homework before spreading rumors.

Har-har, ratty that was me! Dropping mad facts. Wrote directly w DMV to establish content in that reddit thread.

[Dirkadirka]

The DMV did not recently ban the motorized surfboards. They have not been allowed since the early 2000’s when they imposed the mutant vehicle license rule for motorized vehicles.

[spacetime]

What is a rule if so obviously unenforced?

[Dirkadirka]

What is a rule if so obviously unenforced?

Simply that, a rule not being enforced. That can be for a variety of reasons and just because the rule was unenforced doesn’t mean the surfboards were welcome. Saying that they “aren’t allowed anymore” or “banned” relative to this year is a bit of a stretch. Those statements are true, but they have been for something like 15 years.

That being said, I do think they are cool and hope the creators of these things can find away to be approved and licensed with the dmv.

[spacetime]

The new rules are the result of an extensive process that intended to be explicit in what personal vehicles are allowed and not. Electric skateboards are banned, and not in the way they were last year. At least as far as I understand it from my convo w dmv.

I do think it was a mistake to leave them off the list but somehow include hoverboards. And people have questioned whether this will actually be enforced in any way.

FWIW, guys on these boards rolled into our camp bar last year and were not super cool dudes. So I won't be missing them a lot.

[Jackass]

PnP patrons no doubt, lemme guess all wearing the same knee length white fur coats that look like they just left the dry cleaners?

[Ratty]

Wow Spacetime thank you for doing that. Boy was I wrong! You never disappoint. I'm glad you found out before you built one. Now get back to work on thatart project.

[Jclarkcom]

Hi Guys,

I haven't looked here in years and see there were a number of post & questions since then. Adding a few details that might be of interest.

Here are some presentations that show a few details on how we built the boards:


There is a FB page, but not updated regularly:
https://www.facebook.com/burnerboardCA/

The only people who have these boards are the people who built them, we don't sell/rent/loan them out. At BM we often let strangers try them out, but the number of request to ride is fairly high and sometimes we need to get somewhere, just want to enjoy a fun moment, or save battery life and have to say no.

The capes you see were hand made by us, some of them have LEDs embedded in them. It gets pretty cold at night riding the boards and capes do a great job of keeping us warm.

Originally we camped with Distrikt but for the last 4 years (2 real burns, 2 renegade burns) we've had our own camp, as we do in 2022. Our camp name is MVC (look for us on the map) - this year it's about 10 people and we'll have ~8 boards.

We will be hosting "Blinky Things Hospital" for a couple days at our camp, the hours are posted in the BM guide, where you can bring broken electronics to us and we'll help you fix it if we can. We will have an assortment of equipment that could help, the most common repair is to fix a broken lighting for outfits and bikes, but we have fixed audio systems and generators for art cars, other long boards, and random things that just needed the right tool. If you are interested in learning more or just want to say hi, that would be a good time to stop by.

We are hard at work on a new generation of burner boards now and will hopefully have them finished in time for this year's burn! Some of the improvements targeted this year include:
- home made Battery Management System (off-the-shelf ones tended to put people in the hospital)
- better power distribution system, we can now drive up to 400W of LEDs and we have 4000W of power to motors plus a sound system
- new motors are twice as powerful allowing us to carry two people through pretty dusty areas
- LED density is 40% higher and there are LEDs under the board
- better subwoofer and speakers
- wireless controllers
- using open source motor controllers
- board is partially made out of carbon fiber making it much stronger and lighter
- the board is more modular making the LEDs are more easily serviceable if they break / go out
- we shaved about 2 inches from the board height allowing for better center of gravity
- we now have 4 radio antennas for various communications between the boards (sound syncing), GPS, and our camp radio tower. We have written a lot of code related to this.
- batteries have double the power density, meaning we can ride them twice as long

See you in the dust!

[Drizzt321]

Those boards have always been awesome, every time I've seen them here and there.

Obviously you have your own super awesome system/setup, but I've just discovered WLED, runs on ESP8266/ESP32 and includes effects syncing. The WLED-SR (sound reactive) branch does sound reactive effects, as well as a multi-cast sync of the data use for generating the effects, so could be another method of syncing your boards maybe, when they come within range of each other. Or syncing boards to hats/coats/cloaks/etc that you might also be wearing.

If you see a guy with a cane, dope custom playa coat, and white tophat all with LEDs that look to be synced up together, that's probably me. On my bike, I'll have a ~8-9' bamboo pole with LEDs all up it. Say hi!

BTW, I'm Boyscout (always prepared!)

[Jclarkcom]

Thanks, I just checked out WLED. Looks like a nice way to get some pretty patterns going quickly.

We have been using Teensy boards to drive LEDs directly and then using a Beagle board running Android for higher level logic such as video and audio decoding, bluetooth communications, and gps and radio traffic. Our video patterns are both algorithmic and mp4 decoded (mostly cool DJ animations ripped from youtube). We have a little bit of code that does sound sampling and shows reactive patterns. We use radio (Lara LAN) to keep board's time clocks in sync to about 1ms so that we can play music in-sync.

ESP32 is a great chipset for driving LEDs, especially like the recent developments in the FastLED project on that front. In our case, we need 2d patterns versus 1d which most LED libraries support. I have been thinking about doing some stuff with ESP32 and compressed video video streaming from a phone. My idea is to create a javascript based web app that runs on your phone and reads an mp4 file from local storage or a remote URL and decodes each frame on the phone, then applies resize/resample and sends pixel values to the ESP over websockets+wifi with a little bit of caching to ensure you don't get stuttering. Then you can play any 2d pattern you want from an internet source. On the playa were there is no internet you'd need to use local storage to save a list of files ahead of time. But I think it would work without having to install a native app on your phone. I made a webBLE app that I can use to control the burner boards, it uses the BLE api available in some browsers to communicate with our android box on the boards. We also have a native Android and iOS app, but they aren't in the Apple/Google app stores.

See you on the playa!

[Drizzt321]

WLED does 2D patterns as well, and does support DMX/Art-Net for externally derived patterns. Would definitely need to decode some of the mp4 patterns first and pre-can then, and given the # of LEDs it'd have to compute for, algorithmic probably would need to be offloaded to something like the Beagle board. Or what you're talking about, you can probably create your JS/app to send DMX/Art-Net protocol to a stock WLED ESP8266/ESP32. That way you don't need to futz with any custom code for the ESP node. One less piece of software to maintain.

Although I wonder, maybe with a WLED UserMod, you could add-on SPI flash and have your phone pre-render all of the frames and transfer the protocol and store it to the flash, so you can pre-can a bunch of stuff, and then also render real-time and stream it.

Of course, mostly you probably don't need all the WLED extra code, and strip down something that takes in (via serial or ethernet, or possibly WiFI) the DMX/Art-Net and simply spits out the LED info. Of course, if you were to use something like APA102, you probably could just straight use the BeagleBoard since it's SPI based. Those seem to be able to be pushed up to ~24Mbps data rate, which with the number of pixels you have could be useful just to keep the animations smooth.

What I'd love to have in WLED when there's a 2D matrix setup, to be able to simply input text and have it render and output/scroll that text. There's already a ticket for it, but unsure if it'll be anytime soon.

[Jclarkcom]

Ok, cool - I'm digging into it more now. I see they have websocket support already, but no binary or gzip support. our higher density boards have 10k LEDs, the low density version is only 400. The board I'm designing for this year uses low density pixels with high-powered LEDS (4 watts each) to create a different effect. The bandwidth needed for high density would be 120k per frame assuming 12 bytes of uncompressed json per pixel, which is well beyond wifi transmission speeds not to mention you need redundancy for drop/re-transmitted packets. Adding gzip support would probably make it viable for the high density boards if the ESP can keep up with that that much data. 400 LEDs at 30fps should be doable over websockets+json, worth a try! Thanks for pointing this out...

I had the same thought for making a board with an ESP32+external flash and download the patterns onto the flash. With some compression you could store a reasonably long video on an ESP32 with 32MB of built-in flash and then you can use an off-the-shelf devkit. There is an mpeg2 decoder available for esp32 but I haven't seen H264 decoders available.

[Drizzt321]

So....why JSON? Binary protocols like TPM2 or DMX will be a lot more bandwidth efficient. Although I'll grant you that just straight Websockets would be simpler from straight up browser JS.

But yeah, 10K LEDs is a ton of data, per frame to keep the animation at least 30fps. ESP32 might be able to handle it, really not sure. In raw data, that's a bit more than 1/3 of the RAM per frame. If you buffer 1 frame ahead, that's leaving a bit less than 1/3 of the RAM available to regular processing.

Based on https://kno.wled.ge/features/multi-strip/, for "good performance", recommends max 1000 pixels per pin, 4 pins for outputs. So not sure WLED is right for 10K pixels. Probably with your own code, binary format, and just straight putting exactly what it receives, an ESP32 can do. Although not sure without higher bandwidth pixels (e.g. APA102) you'll be able to output all of the pixel data in time unless you're using multiple pins to keep the bandwidth requirements per-strip (to get the data all the way to the very end of the strip) in time to keep the animation smooth.

For the external flash, I wasn't even thinking storing the video files, but instead storing pre-rendered pixel data, and just read the frame and then start writing it out, while reading the next frame into another part of memory (ESP32 is dual core after all). Then it's basically just reading the binary (or text for json) data and writing that out to each pixel. If there's a gz lib for ESP, could go ahead and use that maybe to reduce the amount of data to be read from flash, and effectively increase the space available.

Of course, if you use APA102, a I said, you can just use a Beaglebone/RPi or the like, since it's SPI based. Gives you a lot more horsepower available to potentially do real-time decoding and rendering out to the pixel data. Heck! Could probably find a VLC output renderer that'll get you most of the way there actually. At a minimum it does render to images, you could probably tap into that output and then you have all of the per-pixel data, and map that onto the x/y of the surfboard pixel matrix.

[Jclarkcom]

I was interested in the idea of using pure html/js to drive a controller so you don't need a native app installed on a phone, then anyone could stream from youtube to the board. There are some extensions to Chrome that support UDP and but I don't think there is anything on Safari/iOS. In that instance, the question is what is the most efficient way to push data from a browser to an ESP32 using built-in protocols. Probably protocol buffers with gzip on top.

With a native phone app, UDP would be the way to go and it provides better means of caching for the playa.