 if I could turn the whole thing. Hey everybody, I am Dr. Kiki and I am here at Portland Maker Faire, the mini Maker Faire that could, and I'm sitting here with Lily Safranski who is a software designer for these amazing LED art projects like the LED bra, which is mesmerizing. I've been told. So tell me a little bit about the art that you and your group have brought to Maker Faire. We brought a lot of different LED pieces that we do over in our maker lab, Lumina Lab, which is primarily me and my maker partner, Jesse Banks. And he does most of the hardware design and I do a large part of the software design. He also does a little bit of software. And together we usually come up with the different sort of form factor construction things like how to get the PCB into the bra. Right. And what we brought primarily today was the piece, our main piece, Stoikeya, which is hanging up over there in giant, maybe able to turn the computer. Can I turn the computer without breaking any connections? Hold on. Cables underneath. Well, while you're turning it, I'll describe it. Stoikeya, it's a big, large four foot in diameter hanging dodecahedron that has, there's a lot of people in the way. It has 20- There's a lot of people in the way. You can kind of see it down there. Got over 2,200 LEDs and thousands and thousands of lines of code and it runs all different crazy patterns. Each face of the dodecahedron has the iconography of one of the 12 Olympians, which are the main 12 gods in the Greek pantheon. Nice. And it's all laser cut acrylic that looks like stained glass and it's digital stained glass is what we call it. So each little pane of glass has some LEDs behind it and the code controls it. And it's always random procedurally generated code that never repeats and does all sorts of crazy patterns. And so together we designed it. I drew the pictures, I wrote all the code and we built it in our lab. It's beautiful and it really does. I've been looking at it and thinking how much it does look like stained glass. It doesn't look like little points of light behind little pieces of colored plexiglass or whatever. How do you, what's the secret? How did you get it so amazing looking magic? That is the secret, that is the secret. You know, we have lots of work. Yeah. Like diffusing plastic and then just magic code and magic inside stuff. Mostly hollow. Mostly hollow, because it's just, so the dodecahedron, it's basically these, as I was watching them build it yesterday, it's these panels, individual panels that are all attached. Yep, we attached it with piano hinge. So they're all, there's 12 pentagons and they all attach with piano hinge on the corners. And then the code runs and inside we have a ventilation system like it's really hot and a lot of computer equipment, power supplies and lots and lots of LEDs. And so that's our primary thing that we came here but then we decided to bring out all the rest of our LED goodies. Because you're here, so bring it all out. Exactly. What inspired that project in particular? I saw something similar but not even quite the same at Burning Man last year. Okay. And I said to Jesse, hey, I wanna do this project. And I think I was imagining something more two dimensional. And he said, no, we're gonna do it, we're gonna make it bigger, we're gonna make it better. And so we just sat around on the computer and we were just sort of Googling like what can we do? And he wanted to do an obelisk shape. And then we saw the dodecahedron and it was perfect. I really wanted something that was symmetrical because I wanted it to look like a radially symmetric stained glass window, like the rosary windows of Notre Dame. And so it was really important to get something like that. And the dodecahedron ended up being the perfect shape because 12 was just enough complexity. Yeah. And to like make it interesting without being overly complex, five sides was a really fun shape to work with the Pentagon. It was a really fun shape to work with. It has a very Greek theme. It is one of the five platonic solids being like, you know, Play-Doh's elements. And it took a lot of geometry to make. I ended up having to do so much geometry. I couldn't even like, I couldn't believe how much geometry ended up going to everything from how do we lay out pentagons on a four by eight piece of plexiglass and we had to buy a bunch of plexiglass to the actual dodecahedron as a whole to designing the stained glass imagery had a bunch of just squares and circles and learning how to use CAD software. And then all of the software when they're, some of the software modes work on the shape as a whole where it'll have like snow falling down the shape. So each panel is connected into three dimensional space. And that was a lot of geometry, a lot of math or there's lines that sweep around it. It's a fit where sphere. And so they're like longitudinal lines. And so in geometry, the most famous book ever written in mathematics or geometry up until maybe Newton's book was Elements by Euclid, who was also Greek. And so I named it Stoikeia, which is the word elements in Greek is the name of the book originally in the Greek language. And then each of the pictures is part of the Greek pantheon. So it just has a very sort of Greek theme which really drove a lot of the inspiration with the end result of that. Yeah, and it is just beautiful. Moving on from that to other projects that Lumenola. Well, last question. Did this go out to the burn this year? It did not go to the burn. The burn destroys everything. I have a little mini one. I have a mini one that I did bring to the burn. Okay. You can see it's the one sitting down on the ground and it's broken. Okay. The burn destroys everything. The burn, the dust gets into everything. Yeah. When you're talking about little circuits and. Oh yeah. So I wasn't bringing the big one. I brought a little one and it broke because that's what happened. And I'm okay with that. It was a little on. You just expect it to happen. Right. Expect it to happen and so. And this went to the burn. This is kind of a little dusty. It's a little dusty still. I can see it. Yeah, it's a little dusty. There's playa out there. With stuff like building clothing. I mean, there's a lot of work now by different people about incorporating LEDs into clothing in different ways. Like what are the challenges? Again, geometry. The job is falling off of circuit boards. Oh, okay. We have flexible PCB in here. It is like the thinnest kind of PCB that you can get. And it's just flexible enough to be shaped. But if it were any more flexible and the LEDs pop off and the whole thing gets ruined. Which has happened with our earlier prototypes. So it's just a matter of finding the right materials that are going to work. Exactly. So it's nice because the bra itself has a lot of structure to keep it kind of rigid. But it's harder to get a lot of really elaborate LED stuff and clothing without having to consider the rigidity. We have a coat that we made for a fella who has had a lot of issues needing repairs because the coat goes through a lot more with being worn and being bent that the LEDs tend to break a lot. If you don't pack it super gently, if you shove it in, you'll pull it out and it'll be broken. And that's probably one of the biggest concerns dealing with clothing and batteries. And batteries. Cause I noticed you're walking around with a battery pack plugged into your pocket. So there's a long way to go before the LED clothing actually really takes off in a big way. Yeah, it's called the battery problem. And there are different methods for solving the flexibility problem, but the more flexible it is, probably the harder it is to make. Yeah. And make on a large scale. And make on a large scale. Maybe on one off pieces of clothing. Fine, but on large manufacturing ones. The hands are good, the process are good. Anything like elbows, knees, waist that take a lot of bending, you're going to have a lot of failure at those points. And I've seen full LED body suits and I always wonder, are you not breaking that? How did you do that? I'm going to follow you around until I find out. So I know you have to go, but where can people find information about Lumina Lab? The best place to go is to Facebook. You can find us just Lumina Lab PDX on Facebook. There's also our Facebook page for Stoikea Elements, which is a complicated thing to spell. So if you Google Facebook Lumina Lab PDX, I think you'll be able to find us. Or my name, which I guess is up in there. Yeah. It's up in the title for this YouTube video. Exactly. And then that is, I'm the only Louis Fransky out there. Nobody has a name like mine. So to be really easy to find. Good to be one of a kind. And you're making one of a kind work. Thank you so much. You are welcome. It's been really, really, really fun. I've never had more fun doing anything in my entire life than I have in making this. It's been really fun to finally see software that I've written come to life in such a tangible form. So much of what I've done has just fallen into the corporate cracks of my regular paying jobs. It's been great and fun, but it's been really great to see something so physically tangible. I love writing software. And I really hope that the stuff that I'm doing will inspire more people, more women to go into STEM and write software. It's incredibly satisfying for a career. It's get more girls, get more girls coding. Coding is the best girls. You should be software engineers is the best job ever. It's the best job ever. You pay a lot. You're super creative. Nobody really tells you how to do your job because then if they were going to tell you how to do it, they'd be doing it. Like they'll give you the job, but then you get to solve the problem of how to write the software. So it'll be a software engineer. It's great. Okay, software engineer, creativity, problem solving, and awesome good times. And good pay. And good pay. You'll have a good life also. Everything you want. The only downside is you get stuck in front of a computer and then your back aches. That's a downside. Yeah, you can, there are fixes for that too. Ups and downs, but thank you so much for talking with me. I really appreciate meeting you. Yeah, getting to meet you. So great. Thank you. Thank you. All right, you guys. This is Dr. Kiki signing off from Portland Maker Faire. Stay tuned for more.