LED Sound Board Is Not Your Father

Who doesn’t like Star Wars, LEDs, and music? [Stathack] was looking for a unique piece of art to put in his living room… so he decided to make his own Vader EQ.

The EQ is a massive 4′ x 5′ piece made from plywood and MDF. [Stathack] traced the familiar helmet onto it by using a projector to project the outline onto the surface. Not having access to an extra large CNC or laser, he then painstakingly used a jigsaw to cut out all the white pieces of the design — holy cow.

This process only took weeks and weeks of sanding, filling and sanding again due to the excellent precision of a jigsaw.

Once that was all done, he created the backing plate out of MDF to provide structural support and mounting locations for the LEDs. Bit of spray paint later and a simple circuit with the Arduino and it’s both done, and awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAIHDRCIKss

Too bad he filmed the video vertically… sigh.

Need more Vader? How about your own Sous Vadar?

10 thoughts on “LED Sound Board Is Not Your Father

    1. Agreed, this shouldn’t be called an EQ. Sound activated art seems to be more appropriate? I glanced at the code, but from my limited knowledge on the subject, it seems to most closely resemble a color organ, although it seems to choose the colors at random with the music instead of activating “color channels” based on specific audio frequencies.

      Pretty cool result regardless.

  1. This is marketing at it’s best. A friend bought a box and two speakers stereo. The thing had an impressive display with of course a spectrum display, 10 band no less. He asked me to show him how to adjust the 10 band EQ we assumed that the receiver had. It said so on the box! After a lot of button pushing and dial twisting (big ring around the big knob) I had to let the air out of his tires. All it had was bass and treble positions on that ring and they would make the ends of the EQ curve smile or frown and us frown.
    There is more tech in a 10 band spectrum display than a 10 band EQ. Did it make for a better product?
    The first 10 band EQ was in 1959. Only used 6 or 7 tubes, mono.

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