Art Car Lights.
An offline iPhone and Android app that runs a Burning Man art car's LED lights, seven-plus Bluetooth controllers, all from one phone.
- A Burning Man art car crew
- Design And Development
- iOS & Android · React Native
The problem
A friend’s art car runs on seven or more SP110E Bluetooth LED controllers, each with its own app and its own connection. On the playa there’s no internet, it’s dark, it’s dusty, and nobody wants to juggle seven apps to change a color.
What we built
A single app for iPhone and Android that drives every controller at once, with no internet at runtime: no network calls, no remote assets, no analytics. Bluetooth only.
- Connects to every controller at once and keeps the links alive, with automatic reconnect (exponential backoff and jitter). One device dropping never blocks the others
- Master controls for power, color, brightness, effects, effect speed and an auto-cycle mode
- Per-device rows with live, color-coded connection status and individual on/off
- Scenes and groups, plus an editable device list saved on the phone, so controllers can be added in the field without a rebuild
- A night and desert UI: pure black, huge touch targets, status you can read at arm’s length, the screen kept awake, and no modal dialogs that could trap you if a connection hangs
- Protocol ported, not guessed: command bytes come straight from open-source SP110E drivers, with each one traced to its source
Built with
React Native, Expo, TypeScript and react-native-ble-plx, built for both iPhone and Android and installed directly to the crew’s phones.