Fake snow from an Arduino

The team at [Sosolimited] was contracted to create an interesting holiday window dispay for the HBO retail store in NYC. The Times Square display encorporates a board of LEDs and a machine for blowing the artificial snow particles around the enclosure.

The code for controlling the LED array was written on top of the open source C++ toolkit, openFrameworks and the entire setup is interfaced through an Arduino Duelmilanove. Multiple Sharp IR sensors were hooked up to the Arduino in order to detect the movement of observers, which in turn triggers fans to blow the ’snow’ around. A National Control Devices relay board connects the heavy duty fans to the Arduino. This video demo shows just how attractive the project is in motion.