Our high school Winter Guard program approached me a month ago, asking if I can light up their flags. Their theme this year was Radioactive and they wanted to do something, well, radioactive. After reading the rule book, I discovered that everything needed to remain self-contained. Nothing attached to the performer and nothing externally controlled (as in, everything needs to happen on the floor.) After looking at the flag design and following their request, I needed to attach a total of 504 lights (that number was originally 630 but we cut out 6 from each flag.) Not wanting to spend an arm and a leg for the whole project, I decided to create my own pixels. All in all, the whole project ended up costing a little over $300, took me a week to sew everything, and off they went. They are the first team to have light up anything in the history of the program. I suspect next year there will be more teams wanting to light up flags and/or props. We are already planning on what to do.
Since I can't put the video on YouTube because of the audio used, I have it sitting on my server as a flash video. Audio track is Radioactive by Imagine Dragons:
http://www.thekirchners.net/FHSWG/
