This project is from a long time ago but I think still relevant for my portfolio. Commissioned by Arturo Flooring, a floor casting company in Haaksbergen, we created an interactive floor. The floor was a proof of concept of a smart floor that could guide people with the use of pressure sensors and LEDs, for example during an emergency. The challenge was the fact that it was a cast floor, with which every extra millimeter of thickness brings a lot of consequences such as weight and costs.

It is easy to make a network of sensors and LED strips. But it becomes a lot harder when you only have a few millimeters of space without any ventilation for cooling, and people have to be able to walk over it. I created custom pressure sensors of 3 mm thick that could sense when someone was standing on it when it was cast in the floor. We needed bright power LED’s, since a layer of plastic floor needed to be pored over it. Unfortunately, these generate a lot of heat, that could not escape because they were submerged in the floor. Also, they used a lot of current, and we had to work with long distances. We created a custom heat conduction system, with flat wiring as part of this heat conduction. We managed to create a floor (with top layer) of only 5 mm thick.

This project taught me a lot about wiring, heat production and current draw with electronics.