Digital water curtain developed for Cirque d’Hiver
Posted on 25th November 2013
The Cirque d'Hiver ("Winter Circus") in Paris, has been a prominent venue for circuses, concerts and other events since 1852. As part of their spectacular 2013 presentations they wanted to produce a waterfall that could create images in the falling water. Circad were retained to develop the electronics design to control these images.
The waterfall contains 288 water valves, each opening up to 10 times per second and requiring 18 Watts of power. The controlling PC sends a bitmap graphic at 10 pixel lines per second to the control unit, 100m away, to create the images in the falling water.
The technical challenge was to deal with the large amount of back EMF (ElectroMotive Force) and the constantly changing current draw generated by switching up to 3.5 Kilowatts 10 times a second.
Watch this video showing the first time the waterfall and software were tested together.
Tagged as: electronics design
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