solar powered LED underwater graffiti creatures

June 20th, 2011 · No Comments · art, london

slug1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011

jellyfish1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011

EDIT: if you like this project, please consider voting for it in an instructables contest! If I win, I will auction the prize (an iPad) and give half the money to a marine charity which reduces the (obscene) amount of plastic junk in our water systems. YOu should also check out the other projects in the contest, some of them are insanely good.
Vote here at the Instructables 2011 LED Contest

LED graffiti has been around for a while, most notably LED Throwies and signage using LEDs to spell words. One problems is power supply – after the batteries expire, LED graffiti becomes simply more junk.

Solar panels used to be prohibitively expensive for novelty projects, but as solar powered LED garden lights have exploded in popularity so their price has plummeted. They are currently flooding the eco-system of consumer electronics at the cheap, destined-to-be-junk level , and you can find boxes and boxes of them at any car boot sale.

Solar garden lights (normally used to adorn a path) are simple devices which use solar panels to charge a rechargeable battery in the day, then they automatically switch an LED on at night. Since they are now very cheap, and are even often thrown away, so we can use these to create self-powering (immortal!) glowing pieces which can happily live in the wild.

After thinking about places for an installation – somewhere interesting, beautiful, that wouldn’t get disturbed – I settled on underwater.

So, inspired by nature, this art project re-creates beautiful, mysterious, bio-luminescent creatures from the deep sea in your urban canal, pond or river environment. In the initial test phase of this project, I built 2 creatures, one based loosely on a jellyfish and the other on a sea slug.

To find out more about the making of this project, check out the step-by-step guide on Instructables

the device is built from fibre optic LED garden lights, glued to a frame. the control box with solar panel floats in the water above the creature

3 solar panels are glued together. these float onthe surface, and the battery pack and electronics hang below in the water. The rim is made from an LED rope necklance and the guts from re-cycled plastic and a flashing RGB LED.