Triangular LED Art to Brighten Up Your Décor

Does your home need a makeover? Are your walls drab and dreary? Does the darkness of your studio apartment fill you with the kind of existential dread that is only matched by the emptiness in your own soul? Than you need some pretty LED art to brighten up your décor! You could hit up Etsy and spend a few hundred dollars to purchase a nice piece, or you could spend $25 and build your own. If the latter is your style, Andrei Erdei has a tutorial that will walk you through how to create your own neat triangular LED art piece to hang on the wall.

This is a fairly small piece of art at about 8 x 8 inches, but you can easily expand the design to create something much larger. Inside of the frame there is a grid of 16 squares, and each of those squares is divided up into four triangular sections. Each of those triangles contains an RGB LED that can be set to whatever color you desire. The light is diffused by paper and smoked acrylic to yield a soft, pleasant glow. A variety of animated LED effects are included with the code to take advantage of the capability, and all of them are mesmerizing. You can, of course, also program your own effects if you want something more unique.

The LEDs are controlled by an Arduino Nano board, though just about any other development board would also work. It uses a string of WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LEDs, which should have a density of 60 LEDs per meter if you want the piece to be the same size as the one shown here. A total of 128 LEDs are needed, and those are arranged in a weave pattern. This project does require an external power supply, as the Arduino is not capable of outputting enough current for all of the LEDs on its own. A handful of 3D-printed parts are used for the project, primarily to divide the triangles in order to avoid light bleed. The surrounding wood is a standard wood photo frame. We can’t promise that this will do anything to help your existential dread, but it should brighten up your apartment.