Where Art and Engineering Meet
🔹 Origin
“Can a matrix display rain code like the movies—and also respond with warmth?”
That question wasn’t born from a design brief or hackathon. It came from a quiet moment of curiosity and affection—a gift for my younger sister, built not just with circuits and code, but with care.
Artea is an interactive LED installation built on a Raspberry Pi 3 and a 64×32 RGB LED matrix. It continuously displays animated digital rain in the style of The Matrix, and when the user presses the p key (or says “pie” in the future), it briefly pauses the rain and shows an image of a pie—warm, bright, and inviting.
It’s not just a toy. It’s not just a demo. It’s a fusion of technology, memory, and love.
🔹 The Process
The technical foundation began with an Adafruit RGB Matrix HAT and a single 64×32 panel. I chose the Raspberry Pi 3 for its GPIO support and USB extensibility—ideal for both matrix control and future microphone input for voice activation.
Then came the challenges:
- How do you simulate natural-feeling rain on a low-resolution grid?
- How do you synchronize real-time animation with interrupt-driven key input?
- How do you manage concurrency in Python on limited hardware?
Each question led to careful solutions.
The rain effect, powered by a custom script, uses vertical columns of characters (0 and 1) that fall at independent speeds. Each column is represented by its own state machine. Meanwhile, a separate thread listens to /dev/input/event0 using evdev, detecting keypresses without needing terminal focus.
When 'p' is pressed, the rain is paused. A pie image is loaded using PIL, resized to 64×32, and pushed to the display with SwapOnVSync() to ensure clean rendering. After 5 seconds, the canvas is cleared, and the rain resumes.
Even accessing keyboard input wasn’t trivial—Linux input devices are locked down tightly. It took thoughtful permission tweaks (chmod, udev adjustments), and clean threading management to avoid screen conflicts.
The image of the pie? That’s not filler art. That’s a reminder of joy, warmth, and dessert shared at home. In this context, it becomes an emotional icon—digital comfort food.
🔹 Reflection: When Art and Engineering Are the Same Person
This project wasn’t made by an artist who learned engineering, or an engineer trying to do art.
It was made by someone who is both.
Artea is what happens when the artistic impulse and the technical instinct are two sides of the same hand. It’s built with discipline, but driven by feeling.
What matters most here isn’t performance or specs. What matters is:
- Does it respond to someone?
- Does it quietly continue doing its job in the background?
- Does it turn cold hardware into something familial, even poetic?
This wasn’t just a tech demo. It wasn’t just an experiment.
It was an act of expression.
🔹 Conclusion
The rain will continue to fall.
One day, it will listen for the word “pie” and respond in real-time. One day, maybe it will show “cake,” “boba,” or even “無為”—just for fun.
It may grow into a family assistant, an interactive art piece, or a small home ritual.
But like a good pie, its meaning is simple: to warm, to delight, and to respond.
This is not the end of a project.
This is Artea’s beginning.