Water Wall

A vertical fountain display that controls individual streams of water to form images — essentially a low-resolution water pixel display.

How It Works

An array of solenoid valves sits along the top of a vertical frame. An Arduino opens and closes each valve with precise timing as water falls, causing streams to appear or disappear mid-fall. When timed against the fall speed of water, this creates images visible to the eye.

Collaboration

This was built in partnership with the JasperBots robotics team. The project required tight integration between the hardware control (valve timing, power management) and the software (image-to-valve-sequence conversion).

It was a strong lesson in hardware/software co-design — the timing tolerances were tight enough that software delays had visible effects on image quality.