Spinning Ball Of LED Awesomeness

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO2-tqoyGik]

Take a few moments and watch this 3 axis rotating LED light display fire up.  The final effect of being an RGB glowing ball is nice, but we’re fascinated with the structure. There are tons of great detailed pictures of the assembly on the forum thread to feast your eyes on. Just getting power to the LEDs was a feat, he passes their power through 6 slip contacts. Parts were pulled from an old VCR and some old fans.

[via HackedGadgets]

63 thoughts on “Spinning Ball Of LED Awesomeness

  1. I wonder if you could get something like this to create a sort of spherical 3D (surface only) display by pulsing the LED’s with the right timing. It might require faster spin-speeds in order to cover all the locations while maintaining POS, but it sure would be cool.

  2. Hello, nice construction as i can see on the pictures on laserpoiter forums. But i cannot see the film it is not available in lots of countries (i.e germany9) because the music is copyrighted.
    it would be nice when the film were posted again, without music.

  3. I wonder if using an inductive powering method (as opposed to slip contacts) would make the construction of something like this a bit easier?

    Better yet, simply power it inductively, and then interface via RF? :D

  4. HOLY crap. DO WANT!

    This has to be the coolest most mesmerizing thing I’ve seen on HAD in at least a year.

    I’m quite curious how he got reliable connection between the rings for data and power. I’ve never been able to create anything that strong for rotational power connections, just brushes and metal contacts usually. None of them ever last very long.

    I’m amazed that he’s got it tuned to the point where he can align each LED with an arbitrary axis while the others continue spinning. Just awesome.

  5. This is totally awesome!

    I bet, feeding that thing with some µC which “listens” to music would make it even more awesome. It would be much cooler powering the LEDs with PWM…or even combine an “audio listening” µC and PWM-feeding the LEDs.

  6. Why would he need data? Stop providing power to the um… middle and secondary motor and the three leds would spin on the vertical axis only. I think you could do it with power regulation. I feel like someone with a 3d printer could make a cleaner middle bit but I don’t know that it would look cooler. P.S. That thing rocks!

  7. After reading the forum this is posted on…

    I would absolutely love to see a PIC and some optical gate sensors (or some other method for timing) added to this to have controllable displays!

  8. so now the most appropriate extension would be to setup color bands to correlate with specific tones think EQ bands and see interference theory for more reference. then tie in the motors to work off of the actual music played into it like, each sound range (highs – mids – lows) feeding the individual axis’ motors.. put a mirrored or stainless hood around it and you have a half sphere/shape (with most music/waves being 12/5 related a pentagon would be a nice style for a hood around the central piece) of pure awesomeness. sell em to night clubs all over to tie in with a music feed like a visual speaker.

    thanks for sharing this.. it is a great piece of electronic art.

  9. Very cool, but there is no way I’d be sticking my hands into that thing. A 6000 RPM delta can take the tip of your finger off, so I’m pretty sure the added mass of all that wood and metal would be enough to do some serious damage.

  10. Insane. That is brilliant. I was wondering about the slip rings. Must have been a bitch!
    Well, just reading the info, looks like it was. I especially like the solder counterbalancing. Often an issue when people try to do something like this, they don’t counterbalance it so it vibrates too much.

    Mowcius

  11. Spectacular! I want to see this produced commercially. I could see this being made into a fill 3D display. I remember reading up on true 3D display tech and something like this was postulated but was deemed unfeasible due to various constraints. This seems to have overcome many of them!

    I am all kinds of impressed.

    Also want to see improvements, sensors to allow finely tuned images, more leds all full RGB, semi transparent or mirrored base.

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