Sol, Spanish for Sun, is a creative project by artist André Sier that mixes together LED technology, open source programming and 3D printing to develop a series of “planetoids” formed by the trajectory of autonomous agents on the surface of a sphere.
Each of the 3D printed sculptures, that enclose an electronic LED heart, are made with special custom software, through “progressions of finely tuned mathematical parameters for the autonomous agents, whose routes are in turn transformed into volumetric space for sculpture making.”
In other words the software creates a mesh based on the mathematically calculated movements of the “rays” on its surface; it is built with openFrameworks and s373.libraries and produces an STL file to 3D print them. As can be seen by the video below, the visual effect is that of many suns lighting and dimming.
The electronic, luminescent heart is made from an attiny45 (8pin 8bit micro-computer) connected to two LED’s running a special open-sourced firmware (uploaded with Arduino). The whole system is powered with 3.3 v available from an electronic transformer or, to ideally close the artificial Sol’s cycle, from Sol-ar panels.
