Heat of the Universe

Our star generates all the energy that we need to live and survive on planet earth. Through various processes, chemical and physical reactions, that energy is used, stored and transformed every day. Eventually we as humans radiate some small fraction of that energy back into the universe. I’ve built a large LED wall that displays the output of a small thermal camera, which picks up this energy in the form of infrared radiation that almost everything in the universe radiates. The display is made of almost 800 LED elements built into a 3D printed mounting system which uses white ping pong balls as diffusers. A small microcontroller translates the temperatures picked up by a small 0.7 megapixel infrared camera into an associated color on each pixel in the display corresponding to the temperature read by the camera.