Dance Dance Carpet

We wanted to bring together the concepts of gathering energy from music and protest cultures. This brought us to flashmobs. We decided to create an intervention in this space – the DANCE-DANCE carpet. It lights up with the energy of the dancers themselves, and can be rolled up for a quick exit strategy!

The piezos were difficult to work with. The soldering kept breaking, the power wasn’t enough, and the response to warping and impact kept changing behaviour. After many experiments we were able to make all of the above work.

For the power, we attached multiple piezos to a single LED in parallel. On attaching two piezos in parallel the power output was more reliable, and if one of the piezos breaks, the other would still switch on the light. This required some testing and calculations that were quite interesting to play with. We discovered that the piezos actually generate a pretty strong voltage compared to what we expected. This was also a good learning to understand how to test things beyond a typical stable DC current.

Soldering the piezos was a major pain point. Although they were not difficult to solder, the soldering kept breaking repeatedly. Since impact is required for the piezos to work, this would be a big problem.

To solve this we tried to see what else works on the piezo and found that deformation and warping works really well as well. and we set out to create a base that would create a slight impact and a deformation at the same time on applying force. The piezo would sit on one hard surface on the base, while two hard strips would push it down from the sides, creating force on its centre (the piezo was placed with top side down), while also deforming it.

With that the single module was ready.

We then tested the folding concept with a 3D printed scale model. This worked well in strips that fold into stacks or can also be rolled up.