So how will the light inside Lighty (and little Lighty) work? This task is being undertaken by Nic Green, as a break from his usual research examining microfluidics and various methods of particle manipulation. The light will be covered by a grid of LEDs, which flash different colours depending on whether visitors answer their questions correctly.
The lights are controlled using a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, which is essentially a mini computer that allows you to easily interface with different kinds of hardware (along with the Arduino (https://www.arduino.cc/) the Raspberry Pi is a go-to for electronic engineers wanting to test out their ideas or prototype something fairly quickly)
The lights are being added around a mesh frame (see below) so that all the cables from the LEDs can poke through to the electronics found inside.
Fun fact – although it seems like the colour of the LED lights should be fairly straightforward to control as they contain red, green, and blue elements, it turns out that this is not really the case! The presence of a pesky extra white LED meant that it too Nic 3 days to figure out how to get then to turn orange.
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