During the pandemic in 2020, many buildings have been decorated with lighting hearths in Norway, as a proclamation of hope and love in a difficult time for the whole world.

"Alt blir bra" in Norwegian, "Everything will be fine", is the message behind the hearths shining up on the buildings in Norway, giving hope for a better time in the future.

Why not do the same on the Zity Edge Layout?

In the Hearth Tower, to create the "Hearth of Love", 114 Adresseable WS2812B LED's have ben installed, to form a matrix of 6 by 19 LED's, giving the possibility to turn on and of all LEDs, all with different colors if needed. Animations and drawings are also possible to create, even with as few as 6 pixels in the horizontal direction. I use an Arduino and the AdaFruit Matrix Library to create the effect.

Each LED cover 3 and 4 windows in the building, so a total of  418 windows, 6 mm by 3 mm, are cut out in the fascade. A timeconsuming job.

Because of the length between the windows and floors, no readymade LED'strips could be used, but 114 individual LEDs are mounted and soldered together.

But I think the result is good.

Read more about the construction of the building below.

 

The construction

The Hearth Tower is created using a rasterfile that is printed using a laser and 200 gr paper and build up of the sandwich of the top layer with the windows cutout, glued together on an overhead foil and finaly glued together with a mask made of white paper, before all is mounted on top of the 3 mm foambase. The same technic are used on the other paper buildings on Zity Edge.

All rooms(group of 3 and 4 windows) are divided with cardboard so the light is held inside each individual room. All the LED's are mounted on a backplate.forming a grid matrix with 6 by 19 LED's.