Make Your Desk Display Awesome LED Light Shows

Please don’t take any offense when I say this, but I bet your desk is pretty boring. That’s okay — mine is, too. But wouldn’t it be cool if it were more interesting and useful? What if it was more than just a horizontal surface onto which you place things? This LED desk designed by Saucy Moss certainly fits the bill, as it provides animated LED light shows and doubles as a white board for notes and doodles.

This project covers the construction of the desktop, which can rest on any desk of the appropriate size. Or table legs can be attached to the bottom. The desktop contains many, many RGB LEDs and they can all be controlled individually in order to display patterns and animations. It is possible to sync that in real time with other devices, so it can do things like match the content on a monitor. The top surface is a diffuser for the LEDs and works with dry erase markers, so you can use it like a white board.

The first step to constructing this desktop is cutting the plywood base to size. It needs to be 5×2 feet in order to properly fit the internal honeycomb framework. The framework is 3D-printable in sections and separates each LED into its own area, resulting in a pixelated look (except with hexagons instead of squares). A sheet of translucent white acrylic (the diffuser) sits on top of that honeycomb structure.

An ESP32 development board runs WLED firmware to control the LEDs. Those are a strand of 500 WS2811 individually addressable RGB LEDs and they get their juice from a big 5V 10A power supply. The use of WLED firmware is critical, as it is compatible with SignalRGB software. That is very powerful and can sync lighting effects across many different devices.

The possibilities really are endless and you can do all sorts of neat things with this desk. Make it start pulsing orange when your CPU gets too hot. Show the time in huge pixelated digits. Heck, you could even Rickroll yourself with low-res videos.