Marc's Public Blog

When Ruby Skye opened, I went and never looked back. But TFSF7 was all about a trip in memory lane and nostalgia, and 1015 was a great place considering it had 4 different rooms were different DJs could battle with their best sets (and they were good). Thankully attendance was just within the venue's capacity (on purpose or not), so it was packed but not crazy crowded.

And the sets were just great. DJ Blur brought back awesome tunes back to back, I could tell he worked on that set before showing up :) and then the other rooms were quite good too, including some hard trance and psytrance which I had never been able to get before. You kind of have to be in the mindset for it, it's not quite melodic trance, but I was in the mindset last night and it was a lot of fun.

Thank you to all the DJs who came to play, and this guy giving great light shows:

nice outfit :)

Awesome psytrance

Stay down! :)

40mn summary of the night (21:00 to 05:00):

I got a sound defusing kit for my car since it was a bit loud :)

Before the first day started, some locations had small markets where you could buy all the rave gear you could need, for those who didn't come prepared :)

and you could spend hours making your bracelets. I shouldn't make fun because I spent even more hours on my LED shirt :)

More rave gear on site if you needed it:

Getting to the festival grounds has become an increasing problem, moving almost 150,000 people to and from the racetrack in a 3H window, or so, has become a real challenge, despite huge amount of busses (the busses themselves had 3H-ish lines in some places).

those folks made full use of carpooling :)

Most people, including me, took shuttles, which took a reasonable enough 1H to get there and back, but they had stupid lines that could take up to 3H. The picture below is the best possible case scenario I saw one day I got lucky. Some people got close to passing out in the heat, and apparently one person died in line on the way back due to a medical issue that was not addressed timely enough :(
While Insomniac had plenty of busses, the loading was not streamlined enough and included a lot of unnecessary waits, making some lines ridiculously long. One day, I took another line to another hotel just so that I could get back to Vegas and then took a short cab back to my hotel:

Anyway, once arrived at the racetrack, things were good. Pictures of the grounds:

it looks less impresive during the day

sunrise coming

You could even get weddings:

Many carnival rides, but the lines were long at most of them0

And the ball pit was a fun place to relax :)

Pictures of people and signs:

bad ass tatoo

Other people were lit up, like me:

I remember this guy from last year, awesome costume and makeup

expensive triple row LED shoes

Fun signs:

damn straight!

haha!

This year definitely had a nice collection of art cars from burning man:

dancetronauts

nicely gave me a tour

Of course, EDC was about lots of great DJs, and lots of great DJs it was:

Armin

Day #2:

Ruben de Ronde played an awesome set

Tiesto was back, not playing Trance :)

Another solid set from Above and Beyond

Day #3 was sadly shorter for me, great lineup, but not enough sleep and I was too tired to enjoy the end:

PvD

After PvD, I lamed out, went back to the airport and flew back home to get some much needed sleep. I still had a great time despite this.

What insomniac needs to fix for next year: - no VIP lines at many shuttle stops, so basically VIP didn't get you in and out any quicker in many places :( - streamline the bus loading/unloading to improve throughput - Lines like the Village loading in front of Luxor, were 2-3H in the sun. That's totally not ok.

What they did great: - the Trance lineup was solid, even if the stage, Quantum Valley, was a lesser one - the searches were not over the top (I didn't have to empty every single last pocket of everything)

Like last years, I went to attend EDC, and honestly I didn't have many waking hours that weren't spent there, but here are some pictures of the few of them:

I had a nice kobe beef burger with seared foie gras and black truffle on top. Pricey, but damn good :)

I went to the Luxor to see the Bodies and Titanic exhibitions. Both were good, but no pictures allowed:

Other random pictures:

gondola ride in 115F weather...

And on the way to/from EDC, we drove through the nearby air force base, a couple of pictures:

On the last day, I did the high roller 30mn loop around sunset:

And that was that for Vegas, nothing much more, due to sheer lack of time.

Since I've met plenty of people who complimented for my neopixel shirt and pants combo, and some who asked questions about them, I thought I'd write some quick page to explain how it all works and how you can do similar things, since it's more fun if I'm not the only one lit up at Dreamstate (which has been less of a problem at burning man).

Here is a video summary:

Show me the code!

So, I have 3 versions of the shirt, let's go through them depending on how complex you'd like to go:

Multi Color LED strip, non controllable

It used a 12V controllable dimmer: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHKCTLE which can simply change the brightness of the LEDs, which are of a set color. I bought the LED strip in Akihabara Japan, but I'm guessing something similar can be found elsewhere.

Tri Color Controllable LED strip

This version is better in that the LED strip has 3 channels, one for reach of Red, Green, and Blue. I uses a tri color controller like this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01410R4KS or remote controlled: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PBOJNZS
Those controllers can create any color and flash it at any interval, however:

ESP8266/Arduino Controlled Neopixels

To fix the issue of not being able to have custom multi color LED patterns, where each LED/pixel can be controlled separately, the solution is neopixels (aka WS2811/WS2812/WS2812B). Each LED/pixel is controllable separately, which is done by a computer, in this case the ESP8266 can run my own programs to control all the LEDs.
The ESP8266 is a 3.3V based microcontroller for low power use (good when battery powered) while the neopixels are 5V powered, but thankfully the neopixels can use 3.3V signalling from the ESP8266 while being 5V powered to light up properly. The one thing to keep in mind is that neopixels use some power even if they are not lit. In my case 200 neopixels, take about 120mA when they are off, and 4.5A when they are all lit in white on full brightness.

Neopixels are almost infinitely versatile, instead of having them in single line strips like on my shirt and pants, you can also make display matrices out of them:

I've then written code that receive the IR commands from the remote and execute different code that creates different light patterns, which is explained in more details and available on this page and you can get the code from github.

Here is a video that shows all 3 modes, jump to 3:50 for the neopixel bit:

This was the perfect excuse to go try my new shirt + pants with neopixels I had worked on (including new light effect code I wrote and battery saving patch to run up to 12H on a single battery). I found a few other people who were lit up, but compared to burning man where you'd get "oh, 200 neopixels, so cute, I have 1000 Watts' worth on my art car, they can be seen 2 miles away", there weren't too many people lit up. I found 5 or 6 of them though:

After some questions, I wrote a separate page on my lit up shirt and pants.

Day #1: Video summary:

Ruben de Ronde

Menno de Jong

Ben Nicky

Pure Nrg did a great set playing drums on top of that

Liquid Soul

Good to see Paul Oakenfold again, it's been 16 years since I first saw him

hard to get Oakey smiling nowadays, he doesn't seem that happy the rest of the time

Markus Schulz

Paul Van Dyk

After a bit of rest, it was Day #2: Video summary:

Binary Finary

Fleming & Lawrence

Bryan Kearney

Vini Vici

Astrix

John O' Callaghan

Ferry Corsten

Gareth Emery

Cool audio gear:

this is for work

but you can even play tetris on it

Some crowd shots:

Sadly, not enough people with lighting:

Some people shots:

Sadly, I never managed to go see him perform way back then, so it was super cool to see that he did a US tour and that I'd finally be able to see him. Better late than never...

Here's a video summary:

JMJ did a tune with Snowden

JMJ is most well known for his laser musical harp

Thanks to my friend Arnaud, we got invited to the after party for the crew:

Jennifer made a good friend there:

I guess they are Saison's competitor and honestly Saison was totally overpriced without being better. Quince is definitely a better deal, and had more courses (not that more is always better, but in this case it was).

Some pictures:

Definitely a good dinner and Jennifer enjoyed the wine course (good pairings).

DJ Blurr

Kyay and_Albert then took over