About
Hi, I’m Luke.
I build interactive LED art by hand, and Night Lights does two things with it: I sell finished pieces, and I teach other people how to make illuminated art of their own.
The teaching runs through projects, each offered two ways: as a step-by-step guide covering the wiring, the code, and the 3D printed fabrication, or as a kit that adds the parts to that same guide. Either way, you build a real piece and come away able to make the next one yourself.
Project 01 – Temple is a comfortable entry point for beginners. Later projects build on it with buttons, sensors, and motion.
Here’s a bit about how I got here:
Growing up, I always had lava lamps, black lights, and any party light I could get my hands on. Through my teens I collected battery-operated lights, usually construction lights that only blinked, and arranged them on rooftops and water towers around my hometown. In high school I worked as a theater tech. As the technology for building light displays became more accessible, I experimented with fairy lights, low-powered lasers, wave lights, anything I could find. Then I attended a talk by Claire Danielle Cassidy, and it gave me the confidence to start working with LEDs and microcontrollers.
Over the last several years I’ve built interactive illuminated installations for festivals, wearable pieces, and all kinds of other objects using microcontrollers, buttons, sensors, LEDs, and 3D printed fabrication.
My first big festival piece was Cycle of Light, a large display built from an irregular LED matrix diffused on a sheet of acrylic and wired to a stationary bicycle. Pedaling cadence drives the pattern on the display. That project taught me about LEDs, programming, microcontrollers, and Hall effect sensors. It also showed me the many challenges of powering and sending data to thousands of LEDs.
My latest festival piece, Aura Flora, consists of two large 3D printed flowers with LEDs running through the bud, petals, stem, and leaves. Each flower connects to a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensor that takes a reading and shifts the pattern. A sort of faux mood ring.
A little teaser for anyone who’s read this far 😉 the next Night Lights project builds on Aura Flora and will teach you how to work with GSR sensors to create a mood sensing flower of your own 💖✨.
