The Table Tennis Ball-Ball Is an LED-Lit Work of Art

If you’ve ever worked with LEDs, you’ve no doubt had to tackle the problem of light diffusion. While you can obviously leave a bare LED exposed, it looks a lot more pleasant when you use something to diffuse the light to make it less harsh. There are many techniques for light diffusion, but it turns out that simple table tennis (ping pong) balls work quite well for the job. The translucent white plastic is just far enough away from the actual LED to impart a nice glow effect. Thomasj152 has taken advantage of that to build a Table Tennis Ball-Ball that makes for quite the art piece.

The finished artistic LED lamp has a distinct organic look thanks to the ping pong balls arranged around the surface. There are a total of 80 individual ping pong balls used for this light, and are arranged so that a ping pong ball sits at every vertex and on every face of a truncated icosahedron. As described in Thomasj152’s tutorial for this project, he started by using very fine grit sand paper to wet sand the printed labels off of the ping pong balls. That ensures that no printed labels are visible on the finished lamp. Using a drill press, he then drilled a small hole in each ping pong ball—just large enough for the LED to fit through.

Groups of five ping pong balls were then hot glued onto custom 3D-printed frames, which are modeled to hold the balls in the correct orientation as the glue sets. Additional frames are then used to arrange those pentagonal groups into the two halves of the truncated icosahedron. It’s ideal to start soldering your LEDs at this time. Those are WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs, which are controlled by a development board. Thomasj152 used a NodeMCU ESP8266 board, but you can use whichever board you favor. Code is provided to display different color modes and animations. To keep the heat down, the power supply should be located outside of the ball assembly. The two halves are then mated, and the artistic lamp is finished!