The forest and the turbine

Skellefteå was built on three things: water, forest and ore. Between the river and the industrial age, you walk through the first two.

The trunks are real pine, split in half, with channels milled into the wood for light. The turbine is the way out: you leave nature through the machine that turned the river into electricity.

The set was built with the scenography school.

1. When nobody is around, the trees glow like embers.
2. ESP32 sensors with machine learning tell people from everything else that moves.
3. When a tree notices you, it pulses warm light and a sound plays from speakers set into the trunk.
4. Every now and then a wave rolls through all the trees in turn, in the order you walk past them.

• Four big trunks with 384 LEDs each, a “tree book” with 67 and a stump with 116, all on WLED.
• Each tree has an idle look and an active look, and drops back to idle 10 seconds after you leave.
• The wave runs at 2.5 seconds per tree, and starts again by itself after 15 seconds of quiet.
• Everything talks over MQTT, and the whole forest switches off at night.