How Many LEDs Are Too Many?

“Should you answer a rhetorical question?” But anyway, the answer is that you can never have enough LEDs. At least that’s what [Adam Haile] at maniacallabs seems to think. So far, he’s up to 3,072.

We’ve reported on a previous big-LED build of [Adam]’s before, called the “Colossus”. And while this current display is physically smaller, it’s got a lot more LEDs. And that means a lot more, well, everything else. Weighing in at roughly 500W when full-on, with 175-part 3D printed frame and diffuser elements and driven by three Teensy 3.2 microcontrollers driving shift registers, this display is capable of putting out 60 frames per second of blinding RGB LED goodness.

The designs, adapter boards, and animation code will be posted once they’ve “had a chance to clean things up a little”. Here’s hoping that’s soon! [Edit: Code and designs are here. Thanks Adam!]

If you’re in the greater Washington DC area, you can even swing by the NoVA Maker Faire in Reston to check it out in person. If you do, tell ’em Hackaday sent you.

23 thoughts on “How Many LEDs Are Too Many?

  1. great build, nice video, though there seems to be little difference in the darker colors, but i’m guessing that’s probably the camera’s dynamic range, not the LED screen.

    1. This, all colours wash out otherwise, especially for cameras. Plus the linear brightness isn’t compatible with our eyes, you should adapt it to something of a log scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightness. You lose fidelity but you don’t really have it in the first place

      You can see greater brightness changes with the low values (0 to 1 to 2 are very noticeable) where brightness values at the end are completely identical (200…255 has very little change in noticeable brightness)

  2. DAMN IT! I thought I was on the Reston group’s email list, yet here I am not finding out about the NoVa Maker Faire until a few hours after it’s over. Great publicity, guys… Maybe I’ll start an Arlington Maker Faire and not invite the Reston folks. Any D.C. area locals want to join me?

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