Bar Tubes

The array over the main bar was 393 recycled fluorescent tubes hung in clusters of three. They came with the building and needed serious help. The materials were brittle. If I wasn't locked into saving the original bundles, I would have used plastic tubes and found a better way to hang them.

Because the restaurant was open every day, I could only pull down a few clusters at a time. I stood on a telescoping ladder resting on the ceiling grid, which flexed just enough to make every climb interesting. I lowered the clusters, broke the old wraps, and pulled the dead strip from the center. I swapped the tape for WS2813 LEDs. The backup data line meant a single failed pixel wouldn't force another ladder climb. Up in the power boxes, I gutted the undocumented decoders and wired in Advatek PixLite 16 MK2s. When I first fired the rig up, the current blew the inline fuses. I bumped the fuses to seven amps per tube, and the rig stabilized.

Keeping the original pixel density meant the display needed 70 universes to run. I built a 3D voxel map of the layout to push effects through the depth of the room. The tubes hang at uneven lengths, but the rebuilt bundles survived the daily grind of an open bar, and the backup data lines kept me off that flexing ceiling grid.