The 16K Display That Ate Las Vegas

August 3, 2026 by Al Williams 20 Comments

You may have a 4K television. Perhaps you have even bought an 8K screen, despite the shortage of things worth watching in 8K. A 16K display is, today, a rarity. But even when those eventually become commonplace, yours probably will not cover 14,900 square meters, rise 73 meters into the air, or wrap over your head and behind your peripheral vision.

That is approximately what happens inside Sphere in Las Vegas. The venue’s interior display is quoted as having a resolution of 16K by 16K and an area of 160,000 square feet, or about 3.7 acres. Unlike most enormous movie screens, it is not illuminated by a projector. The entire surface is a direct-view LED display: an immense, curved video wall assembled from tens of thousands of smaller pieces.

After seeing The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, however, the most interesting part was not simply the screen’s size. It was how thoroughly the screen could disguise itself.

Where Did The Theater Go?

Radio City or the Sphere? (It is the Sphere; photo courtesy [DP])

Before the presentation began, the auditorium appeared to have a conventional architectural ceiling. Great orange ribs curved over the seating, while ventilation grilles, suspended loudspeakers, lighting fixtures, curtains, and video monitors completed the illusion. It looked like the Radio City Music Hall’s proscenium. Then the show started — and the apparent theater completely disappeared. The speakers, the TVs, even the stage.

The obvious first conclusion was that the LED surface must be optically transparent, allowing the audience to see the real roof behind it until the pixels illuminated. That explanation was attractive because Sphere’s audio system really is installed behind the display, and the surface must allow sound through it.

It was also, apparently, wrong. The only explanation that makes sense is that the ceiling, ribs, grilles, speakers, and monitors were already being displayed by the screen. It was like a holodeck impersonating a physical theater interior. When the Oz material began, the system simply replaced one complete visual environment with another.

That’s what happens when a display fills nearly all of your useful visual field. A normal screen announces itself with a bezel, a wall, or at least a clearly visible edge. Sphere’s display extends upward and around the audience, removing many of those references. Give the image credible perspective, texture, shadows, and familiar architectural details, and the brain accepts the pixels as a room.

The same effect makes the Oz landscapes seem less like scenes displayed in front of the audience and more like places into which the auditorium has been inserted. Of course, there are more special effects. For The Wizard of Oz, there is wind and smoke, along with paper leaves, flower petals, and foam-rubber apples that fall from the sky. All of this makes it even more immersive.

Continue reading “The 16K Display That Ate Las Vegas” →

Architectural LED Install Shows How To Do It With Style

August 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

Anyone can string up some LED string lights in a space with mixed results. However, if you want to create a lighting environment that’s classy and stylish, it takes a little more finesse. [ipad.bendavid] has a great example of this, with a rather tidy architectural LED installation.

The final look is quite clean and evenly lit, without requiring the use of any diffuser material.

The electronic side of things is relatively straightforward. There’s an ESP32 running the show, commanding the colors for 928 individually-addressable WS2812 RGB LEDs. It uses the WebSocket API for real time control, integrates with Home Assistant, and even offers audio reactive lighting modes with the aid of an INMP441 I2S audio input module. A hefty 5 V, 60 A power supply ensures the LEDs are never short of juice. There was also careful attention paid to power distribution to avoid any dim spots or other issues.

Where it gets really cool, though, is the attention paid to the construction of the installation. The LED strips are installed in concentric square frames, which block light in specific areas to create a nice square pattern, with the LEDs facing the wall they’re installed on rather than projecting out to the viewer. This hides the strips themselves and eliminated the need for diffusers which can be a pain to get right.

Overall, the build is a pleasing one that plays with light and darkness and looks rather stylish in a way so many LED installs don’t. If you’re cooking up your own neat glowable projects, you know we’d love to see them on the tipsline.

A Brief History Of The Crazy Old 7-Segment Display

July 9, 2026 by Al Williams 17 Comments

How old is the seven-segment display? Surely it is a product of the 1970s. After all, calculators started showing up, and the height of junior high humor was plugging 7734 into your calculator and showing it to someone upside down. Of course, for it to go mainstream, maybe they really originated in the 1960s, but no earlier than that, right? Actually, no. Sure, the LED seven-segment display had to wait for LEDs. But the actual idea is much older than that.

The concept of building numbers from a small set of reusable segments predates LED displays by decades. In fact, the basic idea appears in patents from the early 1900s and may have roots in even older mechanical signs and printing techniques.

The history isn’t entirely straightforward. Unlike vacuum tubes or transistors, segmented displays evolved gradually through a series of practical ideas rather than one defining invention.

Blacking out the Eight

While looking into the history of segmented displays, I was reminded of something I’d seen years ago in retail stores: reusable price tags printed with rows of eights.

Rather than printing every possible price, the clerk simply used a marker to black out portions of each figure, transforming an 8 into whatever digit was needed. Cover a few strokes, and the eight becomes a three. Remove a different set, and it becomes a zero or a five. It was, in essence, a manual segmented display.

Finding the exact origin of these price tags is akin to finding out where Romans bought sponges. They were inexpensive commercial supplies, not the sort of products that historians carefully documented. My recollection is from the middle of the twentieth century, but the underlying concept is almost certainly older.

Continue reading “A Brief History Of The Crazy Old 7-Segment Display” →

A Light-Up Map Of Monaco

July 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

If you want to get around Monaco, a map — digital or otherwise — is probably the best way to navigate. But if you just want to appreciate the city’s form in a more artistic way, you might enjoy [Terence Grover’s] latest project—a backlit topographic map of the unique principality.

The touch mode allows one to draw patterns across the map.

The project started with a QGIS mesh of Monaco, with the data fed through the Open-Meteo elevation API, which takes into account building heights. This was used as the basis for the heights of 179 pieces of 20 mm x 20 mm acrylic. These were assembled into a laser cut steel base, and were sanded on all sides but the base in order to allow them to diffuse light more effectively.

Strips of CS8812 LEDs are used to light the plastic towers, driven by a pair of Adafruit Feather RP2040 Scorpio boards. They’re fed pixel data from a Raspberry Pi 5, which runs a Flask panel accessed over an iPad. This allows control over the LED map display, showing things like civic data, highlighted events, and weather. There’s even a touch-sensitive mode that lets one paint fun patterns across the representation of the city.

We love a good artistic map, particularly when they’re full of LEDs and represent useful information.

Continue reading “A Light-Up Map Of Monaco” →

LightComposer – Reach Out And Touch Your Lighting

June 22, 2026 by Matt Varian 4 Comments

While there is a time and place for wirelessly controlled devices, sometimes you want something you can just reach out and touch to interact with, no apps to install or devices to configure. In this case [John] wanted a lamp that was just that. Drawing inspiration from the rotary phone, he created the LightComposer.

This small lamp, just a bit smaller than a hockey puck, uses a 3D printed enclosure and a straightforward PCB. It’s a very accessible project to recreate. The 3D prints are well thought out including a TPU ring on the bottom to keep the lamp from sliding around. The light source comes from 32 SK6812 LEDs, which are very similar to NeoPixels. An ATmega328P microcontroller powers the project and can easily be programmed using the Arduino IDE. A rotary encoder in the center, coupled to the top diffuser, lets you control LED brightness and color by turning it. The firmware also includes some fun hidden light-effect modes.

Head over to [John]’s site for all the files needed to make your own LightComposer, or links to buy a premade one. What devices have you made that use a straightforward physical user interface in lieu of an app? Be sure to check some of the other lamp builds we’ve featured before.

A Diffraction Grating Makes This Clock Readable

June 3, 2026 by Jenny List 7 Comments

We’ve seen just about every possible way to make a clock here at Hackaday over the years. So it’s rare to have a first, but here we are with [Twisted & Tinned], who’s made a novel clock with a diffraction grating.

The display of the clock looks for all the world like a jumble of LEDs, that is, until you place the grating in front of it. Those LEDs are addressable multi-color parts, and each digit is generated at a different color all on top of each other. The grating splits out these colors, resulting in a magical set of floating LED figures.

Behind those LEDs is a Pi Pico, but that’s just one of many microcontrollers that could have powered this project. It’s the use of the diffraction grating in a novel way with those LEDs that makes the difference, and we rather like it. He’s also managed to get the grating pattern in the 3D printed surround for a shimmering look, by printing directly onto a diffraction grating sheet. That in particular is a technique we’ve looked at before in detail.

Continue reading “A Diffraction Grating Makes This Clock Readable” →

Transforming Lamp Built With LED Filaments

May 21, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

[Nick Electronics] had an idea to build a stylish lamp that could transform its shape while lit. This goal was achieved beautifully with the aid of many, many filament LEDs.

If you’re unfamiliar with filament LEDs, they’re basically thin plastic filaments stuffed with lots of individual LEDs that are very close together. This effectively creates a continuous, flexible, glowing string that can be used for all sorts of creative purposes.

[Nick] packed the lights into an interlocking stack of PCBs that make up the lamp’s structure. Each PCB layer hosts four filaments mounted around the outer edge, and has a pin that locks into a groove in the next layer to allow them to tug each other around as they turn. The PCBs rotate around a central shaft, with power passed from one to the other via interlinking wires. Drive is via a stepper motor on top of the lamp, controlled by an A4988 driver. There’s also an ATmega48 microcontroller onboard, which is the brains of the operation. A DC-DC converter onboard steps up the 5 V input voltage from USB-C to 10 volts for the stepper motor.

It’s neat to watch the lamp in action, glowing and slowly shifting in patterns as the layers catch and rotate in and out of alignment. We’ve seen interesting builds in this vein before, like this fantastic origami lamp from a few years ago.

Continue reading “Transforming Lamp Built With LED Filaments” →