Ok, so I like electronic dance music, more specifically Trance. When I started in the 1990's, the US was a bit behind in that department.
Still, with San Francisco and San Jose nearby, I've had some opportunities to see some great EDM/Trance DJs. Back in the early 2000's, they sadly played club music in the US that was nowhere close to the hits they had composed and were known for, but over the years, as Trance started becoming more popular, those DJs finally started playing their good tunes in the US too, and maybe from 2004 on, it's only been getting better. Popsicle Halloween 2004 was really the beginning of great music parties in the San Francisco Area, and thankfully things have gotten even better since then
As a matter of fact, after another 10 years (2015 and beyond) the good news is that Trance has grown quite a following in the US, and places like the SF Bay Area, and while Trance has been declared dead a few times in the last 10 years, it's still going strong here.
Trance Family SF is definitely strong in the area, we've been getting more big trance parties every year, including many top DJs that come visit us what feels like every other week now (as of 2018-2019), and through those events, I made many friends in Trance Family SF. Thanks to you all.
Over those years, I got the chance to meet a few of my favourite DJs, including Armin more than once, and my last hobby has been to work on lights for my shirt and pants (version 3) and (version 4)
Groove Cruise has been around for a long time (20-ish years), but I had never been so far, because:
lots of festivals, can't be everywhere :)
I've been avoiding festivals in the winter because winter is for snowboarding :) (but realistically January has ofen been dry in CA, so not a terrible month to lose)
Going all the way to Miami is not exactly next door for me :)
Yes, there was a 2nd yearly cruise leaving From CA instead in summer, but I heard that one had no trance, and if no trance, not really interested :)
Most years until recently, I was going to Australia for linux.conf.au at the same time, and that was not something I wanted to miss. These wonderful 20 years are however over for me, now
Last year it conflicted with 6 days of Unkonscious, so both wwere not possible
And I'll also admit that I have mixed feelings about cruiseships, as I find them pretty wasteful, especially in a case where quite frankly if the ship were anchored to a parking lot, and connected to the electrical grid instead of having to burn ridiculous amounts of fuel in the middle of the ocean, most attendees would probably be just as happy (let's be honest, the fact that it went travelled 4 days to go to to Labadee for a few hours, was probably not the most important part of the cruise)
I'm on a boat... I'm on a boat... Take a good look at me, I'm on a motherf'ing boat :)
Now that this is out of the way, and you probably think I'm a killjoy :) I did obviously end up going this year and had a fantastic time. Yes, I would have had just as much as a good time if the cruise ship (Alure of the Sea) had been sitting in the middle of a parking lot somehwere for those 4 days, since it's really a small city with all the fun happening inside and the mere 3.5h in Labadee were fun but didn't seem essential. That said it's a cruise ship, so it's somehow supposed to boat somewhere, and it did :)
The ship was the 4th largest in existance as of today if I read right, and was pretty impressive. It did lack waterslides, and the kart racing track I saw on some ship commercial ;) but it had:
2 flowriders (wave makers to surf)
1131*
1137*
2 climbing walls that didn't seem to get used
1146*
minigolf
1129*
1138*
1146*
promenade that was pretty
1143*
game room and room for kids that went unused for that cruise
many pools and jacuzzi
1124*
some levitating platform you could drink on, this thing:
1144*
1145*
many restaurants and shops of course, including a yummy tepaniaki
1147*
casino:
1148*
1149*
very many theatres and rooms that were turned into night clubs or stages
outdoor theatre that became mainstage, except when it was raining, which it did (also the first day was very cold due to highly unusual weather)
This is a good time to point out that the Groovecruise team did an amazing job decking out the place and turning a cruiseship into a small city with nightclubs and festival areas. They really went all out, all the way to confetti that had to be cleaned carefully afterwards and even balloon drops. Multiple stages had lasers and cool lighting and overall the sound was good. Given the location and that it had to be installed and torn down in record time because the ship was used for regular cruises just before, and just after, was nothing short of amazing.
The crew was very amused by the GC crowds (who wouldn't), and put up with the decorations people brought from LED walls to a wall of hanging dicks you had to walk through to cross the corridor :)
1113*
1114*
1120*
1122*|cabins with view on the promenade
1123*
1130*
First world problems: wifi as pretty poor in many locations
So, you would think that as part of my complicated LED outfit that was several years of work over the years including over 10,000 lines of code, the shoes would not be a big deal...
Well, after having gone through more than 10 different pairs of LED shoes that all failed in various ways, I have to say that these were more trouble than expected.
Issues:
the early ones had wires or PCB between the pixels that would break after the shoe was bent many times as part of walking/dancing
later ones fixed this, but still used the same small module with limited battery life, barely good enough for 4H
even unmodified, the LED module resin would eventually crack, and usually the battery fail
worst failure was a lipo that did fail in a way that it smoked/burnt, not great under your feet (thankfully this was contained and my foot was ok)
the only way to add battery life was to solder a connector to the lipo pins inside the module, which is a bit tricky (getting a good sodler joint) and not getting that connection to fail later, which with dancing does happen too often* then, my first design which included adding a 2nd battery inside the shoe, turned out to be a mistake as the 2nd battery was not protected well and would eventually be breached. Also the thin wires for the orignal batteries I used woudl also fail:
I had to melt the resin until I could expose the power pins
looked ok on the bench, did not work long in the shoe
shoving the battery in was not easy
it worked on the bench, but didn't work too long in real life, by then I added an external lipo plug to check the voltage and do fast charge, bypassing USB
By then, I had what I thought was a great idea: why don't I just forget about secondary batteries and use the external connector to power my shoes from my pants that already have 5V power on the neopixels?
This felt like a good idea, but first I had to add diodes to drop 0.7V so as not to exceed 4.3V for a direct connection to the lipo (as a remminder, I cannot connect via the USB plug as if you send power there, the shoe does in charging mode and stops lighting up), but then I found out that my neopixel strips did not actually have 5V at the end due to line loss, and it was going to be complex to safely connect them to my shoes without a voltage regulator and more electronics, making the whole thing, questionable. Still, it was a tempting idea for a short while to use my mega battery pack to power the shoes forever ;)
So for version 4, I had slightly better connection of the external lipo connection with hot glue around the module, but the more important part is I figured out it was better to attach a flat lipo on top of the shoe so it wouldn't get stepped on:
I also had spare modules and batteries in case of failure, and a way to charge them from USB outside the shoe:
By then I had run out of my old modules that slowly failed over time, and had to find a new shoe with compatible modules. Thankfully that one has slightly better firmware that allowed lighting one LED out of two:
This is the new shoe with the updated module. Very pretty shoe, but otherwise the modules still have the same 4h runtime, and still need the same work, bummer:
battery goes up there so it's not stepped on
So yeah, we're now at v4, it still relies on unreliable soldering, and extra hot glue but at least the external wires are stronger, the external battery more than long enough for 12H+ of runtime