Charlie was a collaboration with developers at Instrument. It started off as an attempt to decorate the teepee, a six-sided wooden pyramid, which at the time was the symbol of Instrument. The teepee was massive and had been a meeting room in the old warehouse space. But to move it into the new building the top six feet had been cut off making it about the size of a Christmas tree. We wanted to have it decorated before the holiday break as a surprise for the company. So we built a model version of the pyramid and started working in secret on the top floor.

We decided to reuse LED strips from a previous project to do the decorating. No LED should ever be exposed directly to viewers, so opaque plastic covers also needed to be designed to diffuse the light. We needed to know how best the LED strips could be spaced out and divided up to create a symmetrical look. We also needed to know how far from the plastic covers the LEDs needed to be mounted to create a seamless and detailed display. Lots of basic geometry and trigonometry was used to figure all this out.

So, we cut and glued plastic and wired up the LEDs and tried it out. But the LEDs weren't reacting; a hardware problem. Only one plastic ring had been fabricated. We missed our deadline. The holiday break was coming up and we were far from finished.

Laser cutters were used to cut plastic to make braces for the LED strips.