HALF GREY BEAR
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Electronics · Lighting · Interaction · Fabrication

We build the impossible brief.

Playable phones the size of a person. Trees that breathe colour. Tunnels of infinite light. We engineer the lighting, LED, sensors and bespoke electronics behind it all — and bridge the kit that was never meant to talk.

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The studio

If the kit to pull it off doesn't exist, we design it, build it and program it — in‑house.

Every good brief hides a thing nobody sells: a button that has to survive the public, six universes of pixels locked to timecode, a decades-old protocol that has to talk to a modern web app. That's our bit. We draw the boards, write the firmware, map the light, and cut, weld and finish the build — and we've been doing it on live shows for the better part of thirty years.

  • 25+years making live events
  • 100%designed & built in-house
  • UKmade in Britain, runs worldwide

Selected work

Things we were told couldn't be built.

A mirrored, pixel-mapped neon tunnel forming an infinite kaleidoscopic corridor of coloured light.
Pixel-mapped installation

The Infinity Cave

An endless mirrored corridor of colour — hundreds of metres of addressable LED, mapped and sequenced pixel by pixel, in-house.

A giant red retro mobile phone with a backlit keypad and a colour screen running a playable game of Snake (Viper), on an exhibition stand at Mobile World Congress.
Playable build

Snake (Viper), Supersized

A phone the size of a person, running fully playable Snake (Viper) — scan your pass, take the keypad, play. Backlit keys, LED antenna and custom electronics throughout. Built for Mobile World Congress.

A sculptural, faceted tree wrapped in colour-shifting RGB light under an illuminated arch, glowing in a darkened venue.
Light sculpture · Paris

The Light Tree

A sculptural tree wrapped in colour — bespoke LED, mapping and effects that make it breathe, shift and bloom on cue.

A custom black circuit board labelled HGB-014 Controller, © HALF GREY BEAR Ltd 2025, with an ESP32 module, Ethernet jack and DMX terminals.
In-house hardware

We design the boards

Most of our builds start as a blank PCB. Ethernet in one end, the whole show out the other — our own controllers and nodes, drawn, assembled and programmed by us, so nothing limits what we can connect.

Light Motion Interaction Control Bespoke

What we do

One studio, the whole build.

From sketch to show floor: we draw the boards, map the light, write the code, and cut, weld and finish the build — one team, no hand-offs, nothing lost between them.

  • 01

    Bespoke controllers & custom electronics

    Our own PCBs, controllers and nodes — schematic to soldered, programmed and show-proven. If the thing you need doesn't exist, we draw it.

  • 02

    LED & lighting control

    Art-Net, sACN and DMX at any scale — from a single fixture to tens of thousands of mapped pixels, every frame in sync.

  • 03

    Sensors, buttons & interaction

    Arcade buttons, joysticks, RFID, motion and touch — inputs built for the public and engineered to take a hammering all day.

  • 04

    Bridging, show control & networking

    The missing piece between systems that were never meant to talk — protocols translated, timing locked, triggering rock-solid: one show instead of five arguing boxes, flawless on show two hundred as on opening night.

  • 05

    Software & simulation

    Control apps, digital twins and simulators to design, test and drive the build — so it works long before it's powered on for real.

  • 06

    Fabrication & finish

    CNC, carpentry, welding and laser cutting — sets, housings and structures built to look the part and survive the tour.

Apps & tools

We ship our tools, too.

The software and firmware we build for our own shows — a stage timer, a test-pattern generator, controller firmware — with proper support and downloads.

Let's build something

Bring us the idea everyone else said no to.

A napkin sketch is plenty. We'll engineer the rest — from “can we?” to “standby… go.”

@halfgreybear ↗