That's a great design and idea. Have you considered designing a light-based Morse code device? The light would be invisible to the naked eye, requiring special glasses/detector to translate either mechanically or digitally. The source light (e.g. neon, lamps, something new) would be encoded with encrypted messages, so it doesn’t look like obvious Morse code by using aspects of steganography where encrypted data would be hidden in pseudo-random light intensity/pulse patterns mimicking candle flicker, noise, etc.). It would require a custom protocol, error correction, obfuscation. All made on the cheap.

A much simpler and less cool project would be to convert a slice of the RF spectrum into an RGB value with lowest frequencies mapped to red, highest to blue, and the resulting color being how we would perceive the mix.

I once had a antenna with a lamp on it. It was used to detect best place for the radio. It just rectified the energy it received and used a very tiny light bulb

Remember the days when you could just make art, without having to be a Content Creator?

Respect to the artist, I know I couldn’t do it.

I cannot find the YT video but an artist in residence did a short film with scratch-over of footage in an RF lab which tries to give a visual impression of the waves emitted by things present.

We're bathed in EMF. It's what light is, but aside from that we use electricity so much now, we're in a sea of radiation in other frequencies too.

Very cool! I was having a conversation with my colleagues yesterday about building something to detect when you get scanned by a SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite (we're in earth observation), but you'd have to get a directional antenna to not be drowned out by terrestrial radio signals.

All those inductors... Isn't there a cheaper way to drive those lights, e.g. using DC voltage+pwm?

What an excellent video.

Depsite visiting Hackernews multiple times a day, I am not a tech person. Seeing people creating such thing in a way I can undestand (which is maybe...10-15 % of the posts here ?) is so refreshing !

The editing is sharp, the setup looks so cool and the channel !

Thank you for making this !

Let's call this what it really is: it's an art project. It's not 'just' a cool technical work.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46729428

Aaa, I misread the title and thought that it was powered by the radio waves, regardless still very cool!