[Music]
Welcome to The Circuit Python Show.
I'm your host, Paul Cutler.
This episode I'm joined by Erin St.
Blain. Erin is a light artist who
creates sculptures, costumes, and artwork
with programmable LED lights, often
including interactivity and data
visualization
to bring her creations to life. Erin's
mission is to inspire more young makers,
especially girls who are under
represented in the STEM world, to use art
and technology to make their own dreams
come true. Erin, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
How did you first get started with computers and electronics? I've always
liked computers. My parents were early adopters. We had like an Apple IIe when I
was a kid. I used to play games on that thing all the time and just learned DOS
when I was in high school and really just always get into it. It was it was
the new exciting thing when I was a teenager. I've always enjoyed using
computers. Getting into electronics was kind of a different sort of backdoor thing. I was a
professional fire dancer and doing a lot of fire shows around the San Francisco Bay Area.
It was a lot of fun and there were a lot of places where I just couldn't perform with fire. Fiery can
be a problem. They don't want to let you in doors with it. You know there's insurance, there's fire
or marshals to deal with.
So I was looking for some kind of other show,
some kind of other revenue source
where I didn't have to deal with the fire.
And back in the early 2000s,
there weren't fancy LED flow props like there are now.
And so I mostly got into electronics
because I wanted to make myself some poi
that I could use inside
that would rival the coolness of the fire show.
And then after I started playing around with that,
I started realizing I could do costuming too.
And I did a lot of other kinds of events.
We performed at a lot of corporate shows,
that sort of thing in the Bay Area.
So started making light up costumes.
And then what really like made me jump into,
off the deep end, I suppose,
was I'm a professional mermaid as well.
My mermaid shows,
I go to little girls' birthday parties in a mermaid tail
and sit in their mansion pool or whatever
and be Ariel or whatever that was.
And I decided I wanted to do a light up mermaid tail
and combine my two passions.
And man, that was a hard project.
It was, yeah, I didn't know what I was getting into.
I feel like if I had known how hard it was going to be
to make an electronic addressable mermaid tail
that worked underwater,
I would have given up before I started.
But luckily I had no idea how hard it was gonna be.
At the same time, I met a couple of Adafruit folks.
Phil Burgess from Adafruit lived just down the street
me and he was a real instrumental in helping me. I had so much help. And I remember in the early
days, like going online and finding so many people online that were ready to help me with my projects.
I didn't know anything about coding, but you know, the fast led community online was really active
and really wonderful. And everybody was super excited about my projects. Not a lot of artists
were doing electronics at the time. Hopefully there are a few more out there now. I'm starting
to see a lot of stuff, but when I started it was kind of a blue ocean.
So you have over 100 projects in the Adafruit Learn Guide. Where do you find your inspiration
for all of them? Oh my gosh, everywhere. I was just at a Santa Cruz regional burn at Unscrews
this last weekend and walking around looking at everybody's light-up coats, and now I'm dying to
do a light-up coat tutorial. That's going to happen soon. Every place I look, every place I go, I just
get ideas all the time. When I first started, of course, I had to kind of come up with my own ideas
and it was this event company that I was running. I wanted to come up with a really great
costume that I could wear to the Exploratorium for a big corporate party. So doing costuming was
really a big part of my initial inspiration. And now I'm well known enough, I guess, that people
will email me with their ideas, which is great. I don't have to come up with my own inspiration
anymore. Also, I work with a lot of the folks on the Adafruit team and I get to do a lot of
way more complicated projects than I'd be able to do by myself because I get to work with the
engineers. And it's real nice being on that team because I'm not an MIT graduate. I don't have a
big background in coding and engineering. I don't know how this stuff works from the ground up,
but they don't know anything about vinyl cutters. They don't know anything about sewing, right?
So my skill set is real nice.
Like it, it compliments a lot of the engineers that work for Adafruit and we
can work together and create things that none of us could do on our own.
For those just getting started with NeoPixel or LED projects, what
advice would you have for them?
It's not going to work the first time.
You need patience.
You need patience and you need to be able to fix things.
Man, I can't tell you like the fire shows that I used to do.
You soak that thing in gas, you light it up.
it burns every time. I developed a whole LED light show with persistence of vision poi and
light up costumes. Everything was supposed to sync together. You know, I think maybe that
show has gone off perfectly one time in my whole life. Electronics is hard. It's really frustrating.
It really takes time consuming. It's a detail-oriented thing. You really need to be
able to be in that brain and it's worth it. It's really worth it. When I get out there and I'm
wearing my light-up corset at this event everybody they're following me around people are just
drooling over this stuff. It's really putting the time and energy in is uh is worth it.
You mentioned being a mermaid. What were the challenges with the LEDs that you referenced?
Oh my goodness um LEDs and salt water are not supposed to go together and I wanted to be able
able to take this thing into the ocean. I mostly at first performed in pools and
that kind of thing and even chlorine it's not good for LEDs either. I was
doing so much research I found myself on like Navy SEAL websites researching
open-rove projects you know anybody that was trying to do DIY electronics
underwater and there really wasn't much out there. I was also learning a lot of
different arts I was learning how to work with neoprene I my first monofin I
tried to do fiberglass on my own you know and learn how to do that so there
challenges on every single level. That tail took me two months to make of working on it incessantly.
And it broke every single time I used it. As soon as I'd get in the water, it would work for 10
minutes and then it would flicker and go out and then I'd pull out my enclosure and it'd be flooded
with water and man there was just so many learning curves. And I just recently did a new tutorial on
about LEDs in harsh environments, where I took a lot of the things that I learned over the last seven years of fixing that tail,
and made a new version. I threw the old one away, I made a whole brand new one, which it still has its problems,
but it is built in such a way that I can work on it real easily. It's really easy to change out light strips, and it's a lot more reliable.
more reliable. I work as a mermaid at the mermaid bar in Sacramento. There's a mermaid bar called
dive bar right in downtown Sacramento. We have a 40 foot saltwater aquarium above the bar where
they have mermaids that swim every single night. And it is a saltwater aquarium and I will wear my
mermaid glimmer. That's her name. My light up mermaid glimmer tail in the aquarium,
you know, usually mostly for special events. I don't do it with every swim, but it's still
a lot of wear and tear to get that thing running and to keep all the lights on and because of
course it you know being an led artist it bugs the heck out of me if one of the light strands goes
out but you know another another thing that i've learned over the years of fixing this tail is how
to make it fail gracefully so when one of the light strands went out on my initial tail everything
downstream of that light you know because that's the way neopixels work if you lose one connection
everything else goes out. The way I built this new one is all the lights are more in a starfish,
you know, sort of configuration. So if one of the light strands goes out,
only up to 20% of the lights will go out if one light breaks. So a lot of things like that. And I
feel great that I was able to work all this out. It was so much frustration over the years,
but now I'm able to share that with people and hopefully save other people a lot of headaches
by writing it up in the tutorial and really getting, you know, some of that knowledge out
there so that hopefully other makers won't have to go through some of the frustration that I went
through. Speaking of sharing knowledge, you just released recently a learn guide about LED and
NeoPixel diffusion. What tips and tricks do you recommend when it comes to diffusing LEDs?
Get creative. I just went around my house and I'm a crafter so my craft room is pretty epic. It has
a lot of stuff in it and I just tried everything. It's a pretty great tutorial. Check it out on the
on the Adafruit Learn system, I went through maybe, I don't know, 30 or 40, maybe 50 different
materials and just, you know, took some photographs of and video of what it looked like real close
up, what it looked like with a little space.
With diffusion, it's half about the material and half about the distance between the pixels
and the material.
A couple of inches of space makes a huge difference.
You know that there's so many different things out there.
There's no way to make a comprehensive, this is how everything gets diffused tutorial.
But it's a good place to start, take a look and just get creative.
Come up with all kinds of, any material that you look around.
You got to kind of get your diffusion eyes on, go to the craft store and just stroll
around and try stuff.
You're going to come up with something that nobody's ever thought of before.
With over a hundred different learn guides that you've published on the Adafruit Learn
System, do you have a couple that are your favorites?
Let's see.
I really enjoy some of the super simple ones.
I have a unicorn horn that I have a capacitive touch on.
You touch it and the tip lights up.
And little simple stuff like that.
They're so much fun to make.
I really like the tutorials that are good for you to make with your kids.
I like seeing some of these projects out there in the wild.
I went to Maker Faire and I saw a kid running around in my unicorn horn
because dad made it for her and it was just the sweetest thing.
I feel like if people can, you know, find a way to connect with their loved ones through
building presents for them or building tutorials, I really, I really like that.
My other favorites are the ones that have inspired some of the bigger makers. I just showed,
I have, I've been getting into making large scale art. I have a big large scale jellyfish
swarm installation with 50 large iridescent jellyfish that are all interconnected and they
and they run animations through the swarm.
And I put this up at the Autumn Lights Festival
in Oakland last October.
And a lot of the other artists and makers at that
came over and sought me out.
And they're like, "Erin, you're the one
that got me started.
This was my favorite tutorial."
And then I would go and look at their art piece
and I'm like, "Oh my goodness."
It is just, it's beautiful to see
how people can get inspired by, you know,
whatever it is, the ukulele tutorial,
the, you know, the unicorn horns,
whatever it is that catches people's fancy.
And I love seeing people take that and run with it
and create something that I never even dreamed of.
I just think that's, it's just beautiful when that happens.
- I was sharing before we started recording
that your Sound Reactive Ukulele project
was one of the first ones that I deconstructed as well.
So it's gotta be pretty cool to come across people building
your projects that you see out in the wild like that.
- It really is.
It's real special.
Before I started working for Adafruit,
I did a mermaid tail tutorial as well.
and I've been to some mermaid conventions and events
where I've seen other tales made from my tutorial
and I can tell, right?
I can see the way they did the paint,
the way they did the model fan, everything is,
and I love just going over and taking pictures with them.
It's so fun.
It just tickles me to no end
that people are taking this stuff and using it
and putting their own twist on it.
- Last question for you.
You're starting a new project.
Which microcontroller do you reach for?
- Almost always the Circuit Playground Express.
That thing's got capacitive touch, it's got buttons,
it's got switches, it's got sensors built in.
It's really easy to alligator clip to,
so I can prototype with it really well.
And it runs Circuit Python, it runs Arduino,
it is just this fantastic prototyping board.
And it doesn't always make it into the final project,
because it is a little bit bigger
and a little more expensive,
but the amount of prototyping ability on that thing
is just amazing.
And with all the sensors already included,
it's one of my, definitely my go-to.
If I'm teaching people how to use microcontrollers
for the first time, that is definitely one of the ones
that I think people should always start with.
- That's the one I started with.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Easy to use and just full of features.
Make code, you know, all kinds of options with that book.
- Erin, thanks so much for being on the show.
- Thanks for having me.
- Thank you for listening to the Circuit Python Show.
You can find out more about Erin and her work at her homepage at erinstblaine.com.
For show notes and transcripts, visit circuitpythonshow.com.
Until next time, stay positive.
(electronic beeping)