The Great Wave off Kanagawa

My life partner is Japanese. As a civilisation, they are famous for many things and artistic expression is one of them. One iconic print is "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" by Katsushika Hokusai.

You may be wondering what that has to do with Home Automation.

Well, I am not only a professional nerd, but I have also painted, drawn and produced silk screens in my past and I love design. This picture piques my interest from many angles but, mostly, it's simplicity but impact. It is a superb piece of design. It also enabled me to honour my partners heritage.

I wanted to replicate it, but in light panels.

Starting

I started with the wave itself. Laying it out on the floor. Essentially, I pixelated the picture into triangles, using the white top of Mount Fuji as a guide. That part would come later, but it gave me an indication on the scale of this thing, and I knew it was going to be big.... and not cheap!

I started buying Nanoleaf Shapes, both Triangles and Hexagons, in white and black. I looked for every amazing sale I could find. Fortunately, one vendor was selling them extremely cheaply, especially the Sonic the Hedgehog kits. This significantly reduced the overall price of doing this.

Eventually I got to adding in Mount Fuji, and filling in more wave as well as moving towards the right hand swell in the picture. You can see the introduction of black hexagons and triangles now. These would be placed where the deepest blues are in the original print.

And then I did my first test light. Here, I'm using two 45W power supplies.

I eventually went on to fill most of the floor in the living room, which actually happened to be the rough size of the wall I wanted to put this on.

Preparation.

The wall I was putting it on is a lathe and plaster wall of the same age as the house, so 175 years old. It was covered in wall paper, which I had to remove, and then I spent a considerable amount of time making the wall smooth, so the panels would stick.

Adding the Panels

I then started in the bottom left hand corner, using my original floor plan as a guide. This was the end of Day 1

Day 2. Mount Fuji has made an appearance. 

Day3. The Great wave itself is now starting to happen. You'll see I've already made a few changes from the original floor design.

Day 4. The wave is done, but now I had run out of certain panels. I did have to buy a few more. and I spotted a few sections where I can change some panels as they were larger areas of a single colour.

By now, I was not able to run this off even a single 75W power supply.

Day 5. You may notice where some changes have happened. groups of smaller triangles changed with larger ones. This is because the swell to the right has more detail and so required me to use small triangles to a greater extent.

All the time, as I was building this, I was checking the original picture, which I had drawn triangles all over, and lighting it to make sure it was good.

This involved creating a scene in the Nanoleaf app.

I used one of the existing scenes as a base, which had a number of the colours I needed, and then added colours, or shades of colours as I needed them.

If you make it a favourite, it will automatically sync to Apple Home.

And Just Like That.......

This is what it looks like when it is on.

It is made up of:

• 6 Black Hexagons
• 7 Black large Triangles
• 58 Black small Triangles
• 112 White small Triangles
• 38 White large Triangles 

It is currently running with a 75W power supply and two 45W power supplies. 

To know what I need, I used the Nanoleaf Shapes Power Calculator.

It says I need slightly more than I'm using. It'll eventually go to two 75W supplies but, at time of writing,  Nanoleaf are currently out of those. It will mean I'll be slightly shy of the power I need for 100% brightness, but I'll be OK with that.

The best bit? My partner likes it.