Get the Party Started With This Giant LED Disco Ball

Let’s just say that mechanical engineering grad Garrison Burger’s SOL CRUSHER is so awesome you’ll be wishing disco comes back. Over the past six months, the Maker has been hard at work building a programmable ball comprised of 540 WS2812 LEDs.

Burger used 180 custom PCBs, a 3D-printed frame, and fiberglass rods to connect everything together. With a Teensy 3.2 and and an OctoWS2811 adapter board at its core, the giant ball is powered by four 10000mAh 22.2V LiPo batteries.

It all started with an idea. What if I made a totem with a ton of LEDs? I did some research on the geometry of geodesic spheres and created a quick mock up in CAD. Originally I was looking at one LED per panel.

But 3 LEDs per panel seemed to look a lot better. And it would give me a lot more resolution to work with. For this project I’m using WS2812 LEDs. They are also known as NeoPixel LEDs over at Adafruit. The cool thing about these is that they only need a common power and ground and a single data line to chain them together. So instead of needing 3x540 PWM signals from my microprocessor I just need a single pin (I actually divided it up between four).

According to his project page, Burger says he’ll be bringing the SOL CRUSHER to electronic music festivals in the near future. Each of its LiPo batteries should last five to six hours depending on the animation, which should be plenty for an entire weekend of partying. For now, you can enjoy it in the video below!

Intrigued? You can find a step-by-step breakdown of his build here.