Students Built This Massive LED Periodic Table for Their School

Many high schools and colleges in the United States have some sort of shop class to give students the chance to learn how to make things with their own hands. In the past, that would commonly have been a woodworking shop, auto shop, or even a metalworking shop. But in recent years, it has become a lot more common for schools to have a more STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics) oriented shop. Redditor Graspery, along with some fellow classmates, took advantage of the shop at Folsom Lake College to build this massive LED periodic table for the school.

This LED periodic table is a whopping 16 feet long by 8 feet tall, and weighs more than 400lbs. A metal frame helps to support all of that weight and to mount the periodic table to the wall. Nearly 4,000 LEDs were used in this project, all of which are WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs that come in strips. Those are controlled by an Arduino with an added Bluetooth module. The team developed an Android app to control the LEDs via that Bluetooth connection.

As a Redditor in the comments of the post points out, this setup would be very handy for highlighting particular groups of elements. For example, a chemistry teacher could make just the noble gases a separate color from the other elements in order to make them stand out. Graspbery says they and their partners might attempt to sell kits, or might end up making the project open source so others can build something similar.