This DIY Light Painting Pixelstick Is Cheap to Build
Dirk Essl designed his own Pixelstick-style light painting bar, and you can make it for just $22.
Light painting is a neat photography technique that relies on long exposure times to create seemingly magical apparitions in the air. If you leave the shutter of a camera open, any light that hits the sensor will continue to appear in a single image. If you move a bright light source around the frame while the shutter is open, you can “paint” in the photo. The Pixelstick is a nifty device designed specifically for light painting, and it has a number of fantastic features. Unfortunately, it’s quite expensive at about $400. That’s why Dirk Essl designed his own Pixelstick-style light painting bar, and you can make it for just $22.
The official Pixelstick is essentially just a two-meter-long strip of LEDs attached to a rigid bar, but it’s the control electronics that make it special. As you move the Pixelstick, the LEDs change color and intensity. When the one-dimensional strip of LEDs becomes two-dimensional thanks to the long exposure time, the changing LEDs produce an image or pattern. That image can be anything you choose, so you can light paint the Mona Lisa just as easily as a picture of your dog. Essl's DIY pixelstick has the exact same capability; it’s just much more affordable to build than purchasing an official Pixelstick.
Essl purchased all of the parts from AliExpress, though you can find them from other retailers for a small premium. The lights are WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LEDs. Those are controlled by an Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller development board. A small 0.96” OLED screen is used in conjunction with a five-direction button module to select the image to display and the configuration. A microSD card reader is used to load images. Power is supplied through the micro USB port, so you can use any generic powerbank. The code is derived from a similar build by Michael Ross, though it has been fairly heavily modified for this project. The resulting device is a fantastic and inexpensive way to tip your toes into light painting photography.
