I've been pondering a second version of the staff for a while now and what with burning man 2014 right around the corner I think it's time to get serious.

I'll document the whole process start to finish here. Hopefully with any luck and a bunch of help I'll end up with something a lot more solid and reproduce able.

First off, I'm getting electrical sorted at the beginning this time around. Custom spun PCBs is the name of the game. Here's the plan I've got so far

I got my hands on a copy of altium designer through work (hooray hardware startups! ) and I think this should be a sufficient project for learning the tool. 

Next up is mechanical concepts! I'm probably going with a carbon fiber core again this time around, I'll be contacting Pu-Feng over in china to see if I can get ahold of some nice tubes for the first couple staffs. http://www.pu-feng.com/company.htm

Overall

I was bsing with Matt the other day about some tensegrity structures perhaps, or maybe some segmenting for the individual LEDs. I'll throw together a few CAD concepts and post them here. 

Primary structure

I think there will be 3 primary structures- A centered Handle, most likely machined aluminium or stainless, with quick disconnects at either end (both electrical and mechanical connections), Two Staff Segements with quick disconnects on either end, and perhaps a staff head this time around.

Staff Head

I've got a cool concept floating in my head for a mechanical Governor style persistence of vision display that spins up and gives a cylinder to map "video" onto. Could be a neat quasi 3D display. A couple other concepts were parametric speakers, Lasers, or micro projector in the head of the staff. A contact speaker would be cool too.