For years leading up to the formation of LumiGeek, co-founders JoeJoe Martin and John Parts Taylor worked individually and together on custom solutions for logo illumination, event infrastructure, and custom technology solutions.
Our wireless color-changing LED technology was used in a modern rendition of Romeo and Juliet in the Big Apple!
LumiGeek worked with artist Robert Bose to create a wireless, rechargeable, ultra lightweight circuit board for his massive outdoor balloon chains.
Thanks to collaborator Jon Morris of The Windmill Factory, the balloon boards ended up as a prop in the Broadway show.
Photo by Sara Krulwich
The Turbull Encabulator was the qualifier invitation for the third annual Red Bull Creation hackerspace competition.
Following last year’s Bullduino – an Arduino Uno clone in the shape of the Red Bull logo – the Turbull Encabulator was an Arduino shield-of-shields, which contained an accelerometer, a temperature sensor, an EPROM, a DAC, and a collection of LumiGeek LED drivers.
North Street Labs made a great interactive Tic Tac Toe game for a children’s science museum.
LumiGeek produced 200 of the boards with 150 being requested by hackerspaces across the nation. Over 60 teams submitted projects and 6 finalists will be flown to Brooklyn in summer of 2013 to compete head-to-head at Red Bull Creation.
The Bullduino was an custom board based on the opensource Arduino Uno specification, but shaped like the Red Bull logo. It served as the invitation to the second annual Red Bull Creation contest.
Applicants to the contest had to create something with the Bullduino and post a YouTube video. Team Instructable’s “Romance Pants” belt buckle was a top entry, where unzipping the jeans caused lights to dim, music to swell, and candles to be set ablaze! See below for a collection of contest entries done with the Bullduino.
After the qualifier, sixteen finalists were chosen to compete in the 72-hour build-a-thon, but in 2012 they worked in their own makerspaces and streamed video throughout the duration. All of the streams were then integrated into a 72-hour straight show, hosted by Tyler Hanson and Mike Senese.
LumiGeek co-founder, Joe Martin, was commissioned to build a larger-than-life 16-segment display with an alpha-numeric keypad for a 62-foot tall vending machine.
The massive structure doubled as a stage for the Doritos hospitality lounge and hosted acts such as Snoop Dogg and Ghostland Observatory.
LumiGeek co-founders, Joe Martin and John Taylor, put their heads together in 2011 to come up with a truly unique way to launch the Red Bull Creation hackerspace challenge.
The duo created a custom circuit board with a series of puzzles and riddles to point recipients towards the event website. At first, the board only blinked morse code that hinted at a password for an encrypted ZIP file that mounted over USB. From there, more and more clues revealed themselves as they poked and prodded deeper into the mysterious package.
The folks at the i3-Detroit hackerspace did a very thorough tear-down of the puzzle board:
San Francisco based fabrication experts, One Hat One Hand, was approached by Infiniti to commission a sculpture to tour with a vehicle display at Cirque du Soleil.
LumiGeek co-founder, Joe Martin, designed a circuit board to play video-based patterns from an SD card to the coiled color-changing LED strip inside each flower blossom.
LumiGeek co-founder, John Taylor, was hired by John Murray Productions in Oakland, CA to make a large installation of Color Kinetics iFlex lights become an interactive LED art pice.
Visitors to Jack London Square could request color and pattern combinations through text messages.
A custom MaxMSP patch handled the interactivity and the spatial mapping of the grove of palm trees wrapped in LED lights.
Prior to founding LumiGeek, Joe Martin and John Taylor collaborated on several design projects for Red Bull. The Xcase, an Xbox gaming system in a customized Zero-Haliburton briefcase, is a perfect example. Designed by Corbett Griffith and John Taylor, the portable gaming system included custom audio and LED hardware from Joe Martin.
