Far away, on the desert horizon, a dung beetle appears.
Just a little larger and brighter than you’d expect…
Led by artist Yosi Amar, Car-Pushit is an art car transformed from a golf cart into a strange creature of the desert.
Inspired by the dung beetle and Egyptian mythology, it roamed the Midburn playa complete with wings and its precious rolling ball.
Built from discarded materials — including cut-up pieces of an original VW Beetle, soda cans, and various packaging materials — the golf cart was transformed into a strange desert creature, pushing its glowing ball across the playa.
From the perspective of light design, there were two main challenges: running a varied lighting setup from 12V batteries, and making the trailing ball convincingly appear to roll.
Schéma made the latter a natural fit. After procedurally recreating the digital LED layout, all that was needed was to place a rotating light source using the Plane geometry. Combined with a broad palette of 12V-compatible lights, the result was a mobile lighting setup with both atmosphere and character.
And with that, the beetle was ready to roam the night.
Geek Board
- Power: 12V battery-based setup
- Control path: Schéma Lite (on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W) → ArtNET → ESP32 running WLED
- Digital LEDs: over 2,000 spatially mapped pixels
- Mixed lighting palette: 12V indoor spotlights, off-road flood lights, dimmable filament car headlights, and digital LED strips
- Schéma technique: procedural spatial recreation of the LED layout with a rotating Plane-based light source
- Why Schéma fit well: spatial pixel mapping made the rolling-light illusion straightforward to build and refine