You’ll Want This LED Pattern Generator on Your Desk
Relive the Winamp glory days with Pattern Flow, a DIY LED display that turns sine waves into mesmerizing, knob-controlled visual art.
There’s something mesmerizing about shifting patterns, isn’t there? A generation ago, college students spent far more time staring at Winamp visualizations than they did at their textbooks. Before that, there was the fabled (but ill-fated) Atari Video Music machine. Fortunately for us, Redditor dodand has kept the scene alive with a new creation called Pattern Flow. It is a display that generates beautiful patterns using sine waves and sampling, and these patterns can be controlled with a set of knobs.
The construction of the device is very straightforward. It is composed of 64×64 LED matrices, four potentiometers, and an ESP32 to drive the LEDs. A 3D-printed case houses the components and hides the bare hardware from view so that you can focus on the visualizations.
The developer is a design student without a background in electrical engineering, so even if you are only a hobbyist, this project will not be too difficult to reproduce. There are no step-by-step instructions, but the pictures and project description are enough to go on. If you’d rather buy an assembled Pattern Flow, be sure to let dodand know. A limited production run may be in the works if there is enough interest.