HiboTronix's Disco Ball Shines with 384 RGB LEDs

While the ball dropped in Times Square a couple of nights ago, hacker HiboTronix had been preparing his own "disco ball" for quite some time. Now he's completed it as his first finished project of 2020, a 100mm (4") light sphere made out of an arrangement of PCBs that support a total of 384 RGB LEDs.

According to the project’s Twitter thread, the build took “four months, three revisions, 1,100+ RGB LEDs, lots of swearing and the odd soldering burn” to complete. To be clear, HiboTronix later notes that that 1,100+ LEDs are the total number of though all the prototypes — still incredibly impressive, and certainly more realistic power-wise. A few clips of the ball in action are seen on that thread, including it “dressed up” as a Pokeball,cand a configuration where most of the lights are oncwhile a certain number of LEDs advance. There’s also a longer video on YouTube below.

The heart of the ball is an Arduino Nano Every, with a 1200mAh LiPo, boost converter, and charger for power. An onboard LSM6DS3 IMU will give it the ability to react to its environment as its programming advances, so it will be interesting to see how HiboTronix is able to use it in the future!

UPDATE: HiboTronix has uploaded the project's design files to GitHub if you'd like to create one yourself.