Pulse was a project in conjunction with Dan Goods, the visual strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He designed a built a 12 foot light sculpture that sits in one of JPL’s lobbies. The lights streaming down correspond to data being beamed to and from the satellites, probes, and anything else that the Deep Space Network communicates with. Dan Goods reached out about building a smaller, desktop version as a gift for the retiring director of JPL. I teamed up with Samy Kamkar. He programmed the teensy and the proton and I worked out all of the hardware issues. The mini-Pulse connects to JPL’s online database so the data streaming from it is always live. They loved it so much they asked me to build a second one as a portable demonstration unit.
Here is a video of the miniPulse flashing its lights while I was assembling the project.
