As a member of MPU, I was largely responsible for designing and constructing the units we used to bring our projections to the streets. After we received a nice grant for Vivid Sydney 2012, we were left wondering what the next generation of mobile projection units was going to be. When we received a large donation of tricycles and power equipment, the answer was clear.

Meet “the trike.”

The MPU trike is a battery-powered, mobile projection unit. It consists of the following equipment:

• A big ass battery bank: 4 x 12v, 50ah deep cycle batteries, giving us ~175ah of usable charge
• Industrial battery charger – delivers a rocking 720W of charge
• 1000W pure sine wave inverter
• 1000W Golden Motor electric motor
• Relay to switch between “drive” and “projector” modes

Since lugging around a large battery bank is heavy, the wheel motor attached to the front of the trike gives us a kilowatt of power to move around the city, projecting with ease. The battery bank gives us many hours with the projector, and the powerful charger gets us back up and running quickly.

This is a snapshot of the battery bank. The blue wires lead to a relay which allows us to switch the bank between 24 and 48 volts.

To view more about MPU, visit our website!