Las Vegas sphere for ants. Great build!

You’re only at 10% brightness, that gave me an idea: use a flat (circular?) lcd, shine a light from below, and use a lens to project the image on the sphere? That would give you decent resolution, lower the price, and maybe be easier to build.

YES a larger one with more pixels is worth pursuing. A sponsor (or Patreon) needs to cover your LEDs, but the result will be worth it.

Great project. Sharing some ideas: 1) white circuit board to improve reflectance 2) thinner diffuse 3) modeling to higher virtual pixel count then blending based on proximity to physical pixels - for smoother animation and illusion of higher resolution. 4) pre crease the triangle edges to achieve s cleans edge without stress on glue. 5) print gradient channel for cable foldback to guide cable inward at gradual angle and reduce stress. I look forward to future iterations.

Very impressive indeed. There's a LOT of complexity in software, pixel animation and mapping that you didn't even touch upon.

Imagine that with a round OLED screen...

you're developing their best souvenir

Forget the LEDs, try an OLED/LCD screen on the bottom and some sort of lens or crystal on top to project the image on the sphere.

Amazing work Carl! There are less expensive 1mm addressable RGB LEDs available. For example XINGLIGHT XL-1010RGBC-WS2812B (available on LCSC) for $0.0312 in quantities of 8,000 or more. I've used them in several of my builds, and they also seem to have a much lower quiescent current draw than others I've used.

The thing I really appreciate about Carl is just how much joy he's clearly getting out of these explorations. I love seeing people visibly stimulated by what they're doing. It's infectious!

Set playback speed at 1.25 to normalize

A few ideas: - You might be able to source small triangular LED screens, I imagine that even if these do exist integration and cost would be terrible - Make use of an LED screen underneath an object that directs the light to maintain a perpendicular path to the screen, cutting it into the shape of a sphere. Then cover that in a diffusive surface. Basically, the guides act as glass fibres that direct the light from the screen to the surface, look up "Photonic Crystals periodic in two directions". I imagine sourcing that would be near impossible but there may be alternative methods for achieving a similar effect: high-resolution 3D printed structure coated in a highly reflective material,

I really appreciate how you show the mistakes made in the process and how you tackle them. That's really educational. Keep it up!

duuuuude, that's hardcore dedication! As usual, impressed by the ideas you have & the actual final results u come to.

I love the shake-to-vomit feature :)

This is great! Amazing job! I like how clearly you explain everything in the video and that you even showed the mess-ups! God bless!

Wow - great project. Very ambitious!

I’m always pumped when you drop a new video. Know that all the work you put into these doesn’t go unnoticed bro!

YESSS! I love this idea. I actually asked the merchandise crew when I went to the the sphere if they had something like this and unfortunately they only had shirts a hoodies this is a Amazing idea!

Super awesome project. thanks for sharing

A mini projector inside the dome?

I drive by it every day on my way to work, still pretty neat to look at. Even when it's covered in video ADS lol

this channel will grow up because the explanation its so detail . Great job

Amazing, I recently worked with some LCD Panels and discovered some of them are flexible, but not enough to make a spherical image. Great work Carl! Keep it going!

Awesome project and i love the other projects as well. I am always looking forward to what you will create for things in the future and keep it up!

Thank you for a short concise video!

I love seeing projects like this. Experimentation for fun with a side of "does it have practical use". Most times the answer is sadly no, but the passion for just trying something new and fun is infectious.

bro respect to you. This is. complex af project.

i can not comprehend enough how difficult would it be to build this awesome project! Mechanical and Electronic side alone, how would you even manage mapping all the pixels into animation! great work!

That was an amazing project, I really hope you do a bigger one!

I think its just fun to have the cost might be more but then you have that for life!! thank you for the design!!

Wow, thanks for sharing this. Awesome work.

From one Carl to another, I genuinely dig this.

Honestly really well-made and a beautiful project. Most setups I've seen for displaying images don't use a regular diffuser but one with partitions around each individual LED to keep the light from bleeding into its neighbors. Might help with the blurriness/resolution although I do really like the way patterns look

amazing!! 🤩 it makes you wonder how many interesting and beautiful inventions don’t exist widely simply because they are not cost effective

I had the exact same idea and seeing you make it is so awesome and cathartic. I knew resolution is always going to be a problem, so I even imagined using a projector with mirrors. I think phone display pixels are even smaller, you can look into ordering a custom phone display in the same shape. Further these days displays can be curved, so I guess it's going to be costly but sooner or later someone's going to do it.

Nice to see Malta on UKposts. Well done dude

This is a very cool piece of work!! I also planned to make it, but you made it first. I admire your creativity.😍

As my memory recalled correctly, I have read a video comment about the Vagas Sphere that someone suggested a tabletop version of it. You made it dude! Thats is amazing! Although it's not perfect, but I can the possibility of commercially available one is possible. Good work!

Salute your efforts bro.! Awesome project.

really nice, great built! 👍

awesome project! i think this would be a cool night light where for potential future features, you can increase the brightness if the user touches/taps it and maybe even make it portable with rechargeable battery

Fiber optics?

Another impressive project, love it.

Wow, great project!

Just like the big one, it's really really cool!

thats incredible man! i loved to watch your video, it caught my attention on the entire thing!, keep with the good work :)

I've wanted to do something like this for a while, but couldn't figure out how to make a flexible display. This is a great start! What I want to make is a digital lava lamp. I might be able to use some of these ideas to that effect =)

Great work as usual!! 👍👍 Carl you are the best!!👏👏

Looks amazing, definitely something that i would buy

Wow, a 10min video definitely does not nake this justice. So amazing.

Wow! Very impressive.

Omg I want it!! Great job

This is the coolest thing ever I don't know why no one's done this before

Brilliant! I love your tenacity and problem-solving skills. Pursuing a spinning array with 2 or 3 branches would allow you to offset each branch of LEDS to increase the vertical resolution... but of course you'd need to overcome the whole spinning thing 😵

I have done something like this with a pico projector and a fisheye lens projected into a translucent globe. Worked pretty well.

Great Idea, love how it turned out! :)

Ive been thinking about this idea since i saw the las Vegas sphere and here it is in my feed. Id love to see how far this idea can go. I personally would like to create a 15 inch sphere

Amazing project! liked and subscribed.

This is beautiful

looks cute, nice job 💖

Looks sick!

THIS IS AWESOME I NEED THISSSS

You made a very good method to make LED glasses if you ever want to explore that project you'd have a good head start. Keep the good work.

Amazing work

Very cool project and video!

I absolutely love your videos!! LEDs are my jam. I would greatly consider p/urchasing an LED sphere with nearly if not more than a thousand LEDs glowing in there. haha

amazing project!

Excellent project Carl. 👍😀

Amazing, very neat!

If transparent flexible PCB’s exist, you might be able to double the LED count by printing two boards that stack and use lower profile surface mount components. The bottom one designed so it’s LEDs align with all the gaps on the top board.

Incredible work

Awesome work

So cool as always!

Great work, as usual.

really cool! I love it!

YOURE BACK ❤❤❤

I love the idea of something like this as part of a virtual or AI assistant, where something like an abstracted eye or face can be displayed on the screen and it can rotate and follow the user. Similarly, a virtual pet, or an element of one of those spot robots.

Man I had this kind of Idea for such a long time, but still being in highschool cannot easily act on it , great execution and vido

I look forward to the release of the micro controller 😍

This project is great!!

That thing is fire! I want some!!

Woo amazing ❤

Guau que maravilla. Excelente trabajo.

this product had serious potential

this is amazing

Looks nice, i also have this idea few months ago. And found that there are already has commercial LED Pannels, which is soft, and can do this.

This is awesome, go bigger if you can! 💕✌️

I had this idea too! I want a handheld version of the Las Vegas sphere so I can run a VR app on it and when I walk around with the sphere, the vr world projected on the surface would move in response. Think of it like inside-out VR.

This is so cool!!!

wow this amazing

May be printing the base hemisphere in white helps to get rid of the visible seams through the diffuser. Great project btw!!

this will be a great souvenir

One other way to do this is with a small Pico laser projector, prisms, and the diffuser. As a laser projector it should have no trouble projecting onto oddly shaped surfaces such as the interior of a dome. I saw something like what I'm talking about in a PC gaming magazine years ago. Except that was half a dome, mounted vertically, used a rear mounted LCD or DLP projector aimed at a semi-hemispherical mirror that reflected the images and video onto the upright curved screen. One other way you could do it is to use a flat video screen in place of the Pico laser projector. In essence, you're creating a pocket-sized observatory projection system. This gets rid of the complication of mapping all those trixel LEDs.

What a cute Kolobok you made

Wow, the timing. At the last Hackaday Supercon in November 2023, I chatted with many people about doing a project like this. And POOF you were already steps ahead of me. Well done. I wasn't sure what practical density you'd be able to get with those 1x1mm LEDs. My geometrical approach was going to be different though. Like the MGM sphere, I was planning on doing mylar-based flex pcb, cut into spiral arms (see Fermat's Spiral), but wasn't yet sure how nicely that would lay onto a baseball-sized sphere.

Great job!!!

really cool project

Have been waiting for a new video from you, nice

hell yes we need a bigger version ;)