Our own Celeste recently pointed out that we never posted any pictures of Arborealis actually set up at the burn. Quite an oversight! So here goes ...

 

Day:

 

... and Night:

Yay! Arborealis was funded on kickstarter at 119%!! Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. We look forward to pampering some of you on playa at the Malt Liquor Tasting, and we will be getting bandanna's out to our other supporters soon. As you can see above, the bandannas sport the logo Kyle designed, and are generally very amazing. THANKS AGAIN EVERYONE!

Our friend Jeremey "Jamz" Beledeiko put on a party up in the zHouse loft where he lives. It was awesome!

The music was tight, the loft was hot, and Arborealis got to help out with the lights. We put up about 1/4 of our EL-Wire. The fading didn't look quite as dramatic because (nerd alert!) the capacitive load was lower than usual. Of course, it still looked good :D

We recently got a chance finally see all the pieces of Arborealis put
together in one complete project last week. The tree was on display at
Critical Massive, a regional pre-burn here in Washington put on by Ignition Northwest. It was an
amazing event, and it was especially inspiring to have everyone
together to enjoy the fruits of our labors! I'm still blown away by
how much everyone pitched in and how the project came together. Thanks
to everyone who came by and said hi, and to all of you who've helped
us get to where we are today!

Here's a few pictures of Arborealis in action:

Our leaves during the day

A triple shot showing off our color changing canopy lights and our el-wire fronds

A nice wide shot of the tree at night

We've launched a fundraiser on the Kickstarter website. It's a place
for artistic endeavors to raise funds. We're hoping to raise an
additional $600 from the internet before the burn.

Right now we've got some weak backer rewards, but I promise you we are
working on it! We want to have something more tangible, we've just got
to figure out how not to go broke doing it :P

Here's our project, and I'm going to get this widget embedded in our
profile so you can see how we're doing without having to find this
post every time!

Critical Massive is still coming up and we've got a lot of work to do
to get ready for that, but I thought I'd share the news that we got
placed for Burning Man!

Come check us out near the 9:00 keyhole, at 9:00 and Baghdad!

We've been using Google Sketchup to help visualize our project as it
has evolved. It's gone from a "rough sketch" concept to something that
is actually fairly structurally accurate. The best part is that you
can grab real world coordinates from Google Earth, and then Sketchup
will give you accurate sun and shadow information! This is a pretty
nice thing to have when planning something that's going to the playa-
we all want to be in the shade as much as possible! I think the
current plan is to try and utilize the morning shade to help out with
our tents- I'll be doing more simulation of the situation after
Critical Massive.

... the idea being that we make a hundred of these, dye them green, and cover the dome with them. Oh also? There will be shiny.

Hardware complete! 3x Arduinos, 12x 45' EL drivers, ton of custom
electronics, 400 ft of EL! Sensor-driver crosstalk abolished.

Restaurant Arborealis was wildly successful, and a ton of fun. Thanks to all who came out to support us.