A freestanding kinetic sculpture for a big game week in Arizona. Every block turns on its own, so the wall shifts like a desert mirage, and it works from every side without showing how.
It was never meant to show a picture. It was meant to feel like heat rising off the desert: a wall of mirror that slowly gives way to red rock and stepped teal, then folds back into mirror again, one block at a time. Before any of it got built big, a working section was turning in the shop, every link in the chain running end to end: blocks, motors, boards and code. Make it move. Then make it big.
The look of that year's championship game was the Southwest: red rock, desert teal, stepped geometric patterns. The ask was a piece of art that carried that look and kept changing.
Not a screen and not a picture. A feeling: a wall that shimmers and shifts like the air over hot sand. And it would stand in the open, so it had to work from every side, without ever showing how it worked.
Every block a three-sided prism: mirror, patterned teal and red rock. The animation worked out how a change should travel across the wall, block by block, so it reads as a shimmer instead of a flip.
Bare aluminum rails with small flaps spinning on stepper motors. The first thing that moved.
Against a solid wall this would have been simple: hide the motors and wiring behind it. Freestanding, there is no behind. So the blocks ride on slim columns inside the frame, each with its own motor, every wire run inside, and the stacks of custom boards that drive them out of sight. From any angle, all you see is the wall changing.
Every piece worked on the bench, and a section of the wall ran end to end in under two weeks, mirror melting into red rock and teal and back again. The part worth keeping is the order it happened in.
Build the whole system first, small and rough: every part of the chain, running end to end, before anything gets scaled up. Make it move. Then make it big.
We worked on this project before founding TinyRobot.
