Since we needed a rotating element, the idea came up to use a circular shape instead of a rectangular box. This gave rise to the idea of a sphere, a globe. We liked the idea very much, but unfortunately it had many weak points and we lacked the experience to estimate the effort.
Top sketch: The globe should have separate fields similar to the box. Along the edges could be LEDs (LED stripe or similar) which would shine randomly in the pattern of a line and would always randomly represent patterns like the course of a flow from top to bottom. The idea was inspired by the idea of the rivers in Finland. There are freely programmable LED-stripes on the internet at quite low cost.
Middle sketch: Sketch of how the diodes on the LED stripe could be separated from each other.
Bottom sketches: The rotating element would be modelled based on the earth’s axis.
We also had the idea to adapt more to the actual representation of the earth or to use simple LEDs for the surfaces as with the box, but since it already seemed so complicated we wanted to collect other ideas first.
We stumbled over following problems:
- difficult shape
- difficult to seperate diodes
- hard to guess the effort to programm the LED stripes
- nearly all problems from the box still exist, we even got new ones