Tactile Terrain| Home Planet at Your Fingertips
Awards & Nominations
Tactile Terrain has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Home Planet at Your Fingertips
Tactile Terrain
Summary
Bringing map data in to the real world in order to understand it at a personal level and create a tactile experience. This is achieved by creating a customizable, LED powered topographical display.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our Problem:
Real time map data does not feel real to the average person and is typically difficult to navigate and digest.
Our Solution:
Using a Topographical map with an LED Display, harness real-time NASA Data to view different data layers.
Adds value to users by:
- Having a Live display surface in your home, business, or educational institution.
- Unifying the map the data is viewed on, making it easier to compare data sets.
- Makes your window into the world bigger
How we imagine a user experience:
- A user buys/builds the led base powered by a wi-fi enabled micro-controller.
- The user visits our site to set a bounding box of an geographical area.
- They select data layers important to them.
- At this time, they can also choose different display options (how often data updates, their wi-fi information, etc.).
- The website then generates an STL (3d print file) and a sd card image for the user to download.
- A user can buy a print of their landscape, or print their own.
- Pop the print on to their led panel, and the SD card into the micro-controller and power it up!
- Enjoy your data!
How We Developed This Project
Our Approach:
We asked ourselves, how can we better connect and relate to our data?
We played with creating a display that anyone could touch, while viewing data. During this weekend, we rapidly created several different scales of topographical maps, as well as several scripts to convert NASA data to an LED matrix.
By 3D printing in Vase Mode, we were able to print several different maps (~ 3-5 hours a print, with several printers working in parallel), but ended up using our region (Pacfic North West United States) as our test case.
We were not able to achieve integration of all these pieces and parts, but were able to demonstrate separate functionality at every level.
Achievements:
- UX Experience on a website
- Front-end website displays data in real time
- Conversion of Data to a LED matrix
- Micro-Controller (raspberry Pi) able to fetch real-time data and display on a LED matrix
- Topographical map on a LED scale with adjustable stand
Tools and Hardware used:
- Python 3
- Fusion 360 - Used to 3D Model display stand
- Laser Cutter - Stand made from 6mm Birch
- Adafruit LED 32 x 32 Matrix Display
- Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT
- Raspberry Pi 3B+
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
All real-time data is sourced from:
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
Software Resources and References:
- Open source LED matrices driver - rgbmatrix library
- 3D topographical model generation tool
- Core library for topographic map information
- Adafruit Reference materials