800+ LED Wall With Diffuser Panel Is A Work Of Art

LED Wall

What happens when you take over 800 individually addressable super bright RGB LEDs and house them in a giant diffused panel? You get awesome. That’s what you get.

[Epoch Rises] is a small electronic music and interactive technology duo who create cool interactive projects (like this wall) for their live shows and performances. They love their WS2812B LEDs.

The cool thing about this wall is that it can take any video input, it can be controlled by sound or music, an iPad, or even generate random imagery by itself. The 800 LEDs are controlled by a Teensy 3.0 using the OctoWS2811 library from Paul Stoffregen which is capable of driving over 1000 LEDs at a whopping 30FPS using just one Teensy microcontroller. It works by using Direct Memory Access to send data over serial into the Teensy’s memory and directly out to the LEDs with very little overhead — it is a Teensy after all!

As an added bit of interactivity, they’ve also written an app for Kinect that allows the wall to react to people dancing in front of it!

Let’s see them make a bigger one next time — Like this 1470 pixel stage wall!

21 thoughts on “800+ LED Wall With Diffuser Panel Is A Work Of Art

        1. That’s sick man. And why would that be your first thought or even last? And why would public make a difference? If I found out someone does this, I’ll go Dick Cheney on them.

    1. What they could have done, which you can’t do with the aforesaid TV, is wrap that bad-boy around a cylinder (or some other curved surface). They just didn’t think (far enough) outside the box.

  1. A 32 foot TV would be awesome, but expensive as hell :)

    But where is the fun in just mounting a TV on a wall and connect it to a computer?

    I’m thinking of building something similar in the hallway instead of the lights that are there now.

    1. Depending on what part of the world you live in, and how much time can you spend searching for it, it could be expensive as hell or just a few $/€/£ etc. handed to a local flea market/recycling dump etc. I’ve bought a brand new 42″ 5 years ago at less than 40% its price because its cardboard box and padding were damaged beyond repair. Nobody would purchase it although it had not a single scratch. I did and it still works like a charm.
      That applies to a lot of things. Want a new refrigerator at big discount? Just ask them for the one that got some bumps during transport. That’s how you save money, not coupons.

    1. I’d agree if it was supposed to be some sort of pixelated art piece, but having the separate LEDs blur/blend in with each other actually makes the effect of the visualizations better… I say keep it as is, but use LED strips where the LEDs are close to each other for an even better effect.

  2. Well, it’s a nice, clean and straightforward build. But it’s hardly “a work of art”. In the end it looks like a common 16:9 monitor, acts like one, and costs just as much. There is some beauty in the control software, though.

    1. I agree, it’s a haphazard build and fairly easy too – they just didn’t really care to take the time to do it right. This is like the “hello world” of LED project builds, and they are using off-the-shelf software too so I’m not that impressed. And yes, I’ve built far more advanced and interesting things with LEDs myself.

  3. Why is everybody so negative? They build their own LED wall using led strips. Thats a clever approach I havent seen before. Does every hack need to be complicated to get positve feedback?

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