Interactive Dance Floor Uses 256 Individual Lighting Cells

If paying money to rent a light-up dance floor doesn’t sound appealing, you can always just build one. As the video here should illustrate pretty well, any possible cost savings would certainly be canceled out by the amount of labor required to finish it.

Then again, what these hackers came up with was something looks really incredible in action — as first seen around 6:30. It can even be used to play Dance Dance Revolution with up to 16 players!

Putting this all together was no piece of cake, and even after testing each cell individually, there were a few electrical problems that had to be debugged when assembled. There are 64 panels, each with four cells, for a total of 256 cells and 7,680 RGB LEDs arranged as 2,560 addressable pixels.

The setup uses a Teensy 3.1 to control the LED strips buried in the interactive floor, and an Arduino Mega to take inputs from the 256 pressure-sensitive switches under the surface.

Intrigued? Be sure to check out the team’s entire write-up, as well as see it in action below.