Christmas Ballance – stroboscopically animated Christmas ornaments

Jiří, who likes to decorate Easter Eggs in an engineering way including EggBot drawn stroboscopic patterns (Eggstatic) or a laser created temporal patterns in photochromic paint (Eggstatic 2), decided to move from eggs to balls this year. With great help from his colleagues Martin, Krištof, and Filip they took Christmas ornaments to the next level and taught them to dance!

The stroboscopic patterns are designed in MATLAB and drawn by EggBot Pro on colored glass Christmas ornaments. Motion of the balls is controlled by custom mechanism built using components from two Prusa mk3 3D printers, like six stepper motors and two Rambo boards. On top of designing the patterns, which is Jiri’s hobby (when he is not busy with research) and building the whole contraption in a very short time, the team had to deal with issues including non-spherical ornaments, or how to use Rambo board to precisely control the velocity profiles. The story behind the creation of the video is full of serendipity and there is even one unintentional “Easter Egg” left in the video (well at least one that we are aware of).

Merry Christmas from Advanced Algorithms for Control and Communications group!