Kwibuka30 – Tree of Life in Rwanda – Part2 – Installation process

Kwibuka is a special commemoration day for milions of Rwandans. We felt honored to be part of a large group of professionals from around the world that helped built this. 

Before the actuall thing, we had to built a mocap in local warehouse. We had to test every single piece of equipment – all controllers, SPI Lamps, each and every ethernet cable that we had prepared. We experienced very early on the quality of the pixel strips that we were using – 60pix/m in a 360 plastic tube. Incredibly good looking! Yet lacking the quality needed for such large project. 

160 000 pixels controlled with 39 LED Ethernet Controller 3 devices. On top of that, we had to use over 300 SPI Lamps. Each circullar truss has several groups of SPI Lamps. Each Group had the exact number of pixels set on it. Each such group had to be carefully calculated so that the total no. of pixels won’t exceed the max. of the controller – 4096 pixels.

We used the integrated switch on each LEC3 controller to connect the groups of devices on each truss. Then another ethernet switch to get the signal to FoH, where PC running SMODE was sending the content in real-time to each pixel.

Mapping of this was piece of cake! We really hope to get another chance of working with someone who can work with it like this time – since the results are incredible and you can see them in our previous blog 🙂