Building a Mini Vegas-Sphere

ever since the Vegas sphere was revealed I was  amazed by the engineering involved in it it's   like this mathematical Wonder made from millions  of LEDs which honestly looks like CGI I haven't   had the chance to see it in real life because I  live so far away but what I want to do is build   a baseball sized version of it that can live on  my desk this is not going to be easy because we   need to fit as many LEDs as physically possible  have them be equally spaced and also figure out   how to create this spherical look one way of  doing this is by spinning a ring of LEDs with a   motor this can get quite a good resolution  but there's a few disadvantages about it the second option is to use a flexible circuit  the idea here is to have some kind of 2D shape   that could wrap around a plastic Mount to form  the hemisphere I used a similar approach a few   years ago for this led ping pong ball build  that one only had 242 LEDs and they weren't   equally spaced which lost a bit of the magic  I think this idea could better represent the   technology used in the Las Vegas sphere because  obviously the building doesn't have any Motors   spinning LEDs around so next I had to figure out a  two-dimensional shape that could be folded into a   sphere while still keeping equally spaced pixels  making models out of paper helped me understand   which shape could work best with flexible circuits  so far this one is the roundest but it's going to   be impossible to align the LEDs because the edges  are curved the best option was to construct the   sphere from tiny triangles this is what's called  a geodesic sphere and it's the math behind every   spherical building around the world the larger  the sphere is the more triangles you need but   mine was only going to be 6 cm diameter so I was  using what's called a V3 model which is like the   basic level so with the help of these online  calculators I found the dimensions of my model   imported at the DXF file into Altium designer  and then divided the outline into other tiny   triangles to fit the LEDs the way I tackled this  complex pcb design is by dividing the geodome   into five pieces so I only rooted one piece and  then inserted the same design five times into a   panel this was a bit risky because all the nets  disappear so if there's a short Altium won't see   it but it saved me a lot of time the LEDs I'm  using here are the smallest addressable LEDs   and in total I managed to fit 945 I also had to  turn this into a four layer flexible board so   that I could add power planes and decoupling  capacitors to reduce noise remember if you'd   like to try Altium designer there's a link for it  in the description where you can also get 25% off   unfortunately this first PCB I received had some  issues there was a short which I didn't not catch   in my panel design and it was inside one of the  inner layers so I couldn't fix it and test out   the board this also meant that the assembly could  not be tested and some LEDs had some soldering   issues the adhesive on the back side was also wet  from the alcohol cleaning which was unmountable   but together with PCBway's help we resolve these  issues and they managed to sponsor five fresh new   boards next I connected the board to my favorite  controller and this time all of the 945 LEDs were   blinking red green and blue the brightness of  the LEDs was just set to 10% power so that I   could power it from the USBC Port The Next Step  was the scariest because I had to peel the tape   cover align and mounted to the 3D printed base  it had some edges that didn't stick too well to   the base and the pixels were a little too bright  to look at but adding a white 3D printed diffuser   brought a nicer effect some of the seams are  visible through the diffuser but I don't think   there's a way to hide them further while I  was writing some code to create new patterns   on the display I accidentally ripped off the  flexible cable this was an unfixable mistake   because the tracks were inside the inner layers  I modified the mechanical design to prevent this   from happening again but I had to start again with  a new board and this one was a disaster to mount and it wasn't just this one the same thing  happened with another new board one of the   things we noticed is that the tape has become  less sticky over time and most probably this   was happening because of the temperature and  humidity in my workshop so for the fourth   attempt I dried out the boards before mounting  them and this made a huge difference because all   the pixels were now curved the right way there  was a little bump over here at the point where   the cable enters inside but with the diffuser  it still didn't look that bad so the next step   was to discover what this thing can show and  the simplest way was to start with patterns to show some of these animations I had to figure  out how to take a low resolution image and map   it to the sphere with the same method I managed  to create a blinking eye which didn't look too   bad however the effect starts to get lost when  you shift the eyeball because the circular Iris   cannot keep its shape the main problem here has to  do with the resolution we almost have 1,000 pixels   which may seem a lot but the radius is still  small nonlinear and and still not very dense   so the size struggles to show like basic text,  the planet Earth, Pokémon balls and fish but I   did manage to animate the iconic sphere emoji  character it started by looking like a creepy   Emoji but eventually I evolved it into something  friendly when you pick it up it gets scared and   shaking it makes it vomit now the biggest problem  with this technology is that each individual LED   cost around 5 cents which brings the total  cost of all the LEDS to around $50 and this   is still not including the PCB, the soldering,  the controller, and the mechanical assembly so   I think the price of this thing considering what  it can display is out of proportion going to a   bigger size would improve the resolution because  you have denser pixels but it's would also come   at an even higher price so I'm not completely  sure if this idea is worth pursuing further   do let me know what you think in the comments down  below and if you enjoy this build please consider   subscribing and liking this video huge thank  you to all my patreons for supporting my work

Channel: Carl Bugeja

Views: 1,193,199

Keywords: arduino, diy, pcb design, design, engineer, technology, robotics, art, pcb, arduino projects, carl bugeja, electronics, electronics design, circuit, robot, circuit design, raspberry pi, esp32, msg, msg sphere, mini sphere, sphere, sphere display, led, led lights, led display, spherical display, ball, globe, emoji, las vegas, vegas sphere, maker, electronic projects, led projects, diy led, diy lights, rgb led, rgb display, flexible pcb, flexpcb, making, how to, geodome, pov display

Id: Jjg6-xT6rJg

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024