Discobasket

I had to design an LED strip that survives a crowd grabbing it all night without someone slicing their hands. I added armored pixel sticks to a metal basket for a dance platform in the middle of a nightclub floor.

I heatshrunk the strips to aluminum sticks. I secured them to the cage spokes with hose clamps and buried the hardware in hot glue. I built the basket in halves to fit it through the garage doors across the alley. I programmed the pixel map while it sat in pieces. Data hit a decoder under the deck through a cheap access point bridge or a hardline cable.

The square channel base eventually chewed through the wire insulation. Pull force ripped the solder pads, taking out a couple strips at a time until I spliced new ones in. But when half a dozen people packed inside the cage to dance, the armored sticks survived the crowd.