You’re only at 10% brightness, that gave me an idea: use a flat (circular?) lcd, shine a light from below, and use a lens to project the image on the sphere? That would give you decent resolution, lower the price, and maybe be easier to build.

Las Vegas sphere for ants. Great build!

Great project. Sharing some ideas: 1) white circuit board to improve reflectance 2) thinner diffuse 3) modeling to higher virtual pixel count then blending based on proximity to physical pixels - for smoother animation and illusion of higher resolution. 4) pre crease the triangle edges to achieve s cleans edge without stress on glue. 5) print gradient channel for cable foldback to guide cable inward at gradual angle and reduce stress. I look forward to future iterations.

YES a larger one with more pixels is worth pursuing. A sponsor (or Patreon) needs to cover your LEDs, but the result will be worth it.

Imagine that with a round OLED screen...

Very impressive indeed. There's a LOT of complexity in software, pixel animation and mapping that you didn't even touch upon.

Amazing work Carl! There are less expensive 1mm addressable RGB LEDs available. For example XINGLIGHT XL-1010RGBC-WS2812B (available on LCSC) for $0.0312 in quantities of 8,000 or more. I've used them in several of my builds, and they also seem to have a much lower quiescent current draw than others I've used.

A few ideas: - You might be able to source small triangular LED screens, I imagine that even if these do exist integration and cost would be terrible - Make use of an LED screen underneath an object that directs the light to maintain a perpendicular path to the screen, cutting it into the shape of a sphere. Then cover that in a diffusive surface. Basically, the guides act as glass fibres that direct the light from the screen to the surface, look up "Photonic Crystals periodic in two directions". I imagine sourcing that would be near impossible but there may be alternative methods for achieving a similar effect: high-resolution 3D printed structure coated in a highly reflective material,

The thing I really appreciate about Carl is just how much joy he's clearly getting out of these explorations. I love seeing people visibly stimulated by what they're doing. It's infectious!

A mini projector inside the dome?

I drive by it every day on my way to work, still pretty neat to look at. Even when it's covered in video ADS lol

Forget the LEDs, try an OLED/LCD screen on the bottom and some sort of lens or crystal on top to project the image on the sphere.

i can not comprehend enough how difficult would it be to build this awesome project! Mechanical and Electronic side alone, how would you even manage mapping all the pixels into animation! great work!

I really appreciate how you show the mistakes made in the process and how you tackle them. That's really educational. Keep it up!

This is great! Amazing job! I like how clearly you explain everything in the video and that you even showed the mess-ups! God bless!

duuuuude, that's hardcore dedication! As usual, impressed by the ideas you have & the actual final results u come to.

bro respect to you. This is. complex af project.

YESSS! I love this idea. I actually asked the merchandise crew when I went to the the sphere if they had something like this and unfortunately they only had shirts a hoodies this is a Amazing idea!

Amazing, I recently worked with some LCD Panels and discovered some of them are flexible, but not enough to make a spherical image. Great work Carl! Keep it going!

Wow - great project. Very ambitious!

Honestly really well-made and a beautiful project. Most setups I've seen for displaying images don't use a regular diffuser but one with partitions around each individual LED to keep the light from bleeding into its neighbors. Might help with the blurriness/resolution although I do really like the way patterns look

Super awesome project. thanks for sharing

you're developing their best souvenir

I had the exact same idea and seeing you make it is so awesome and cathartic. I knew resolution is always going to be a problem, so I even imagined using a projector with mirrors. I think phone display pixels are even smaller, you can look into ordering a custom phone display in the same shape. Further these days displays can be curved, so I guess it's going to be costly but sooner or later someone's going to do it.

Brilliant! I love your tenacity and problem-solving skills. Pursuing a spinning array with 2 or 3 branches would allow you to offset each branch of LEDS to increase the vertical resolution... but of course you'd need to overcome the whole spinning thing 😵

Wow, a 10min video definitely does not nake this justice. So amazing.

Fiber optics?

Salute your efforts bro.! Awesome project.

Wow, thanks for sharing this. Awesome work.

Wow! Very impressive.

Cool project as always! Maybe you can create a cheaper version of this with a more regular pixel layout by simply stacking regular PCBs that only have LEDs around the circular circumference. Or maybe create a bunch of really tiny triangular PCBs that can be tiled, including the connections, any solder them into a sphere.

As my memory recalled correctly, I have read a video comment about the Vagas Sphere that someone suggested a tabletop version of it. You made it dude! Thats is amazing! Although it's not perfect, but I can the possibility of commercially available one is possible. Good work!

I’m always pumped when you drop a new video. Know that all the work you put into these doesn’t go unnoticed bro!

I love the idea of something like this as part of a virtual or AI assistant, where something like an abstracted eye or face can be displayed on the screen and it can rotate and follow the user. Similarly, a virtual pet, or an element of one of those spot robots.

That was an amazing project, I really hope you do a bigger one!

Awesome project and i love the other projects as well. I am always looking forward to what you will create for things in the future and keep it up!

Looks amazing, definitely something that i would buy

This is the coolest thing ever I don't know why no one's done this before

Just like the big one, it's really really cool!

You made a very good method to make LED glasses if you ever want to explore that project you'd have a good head start. Keep the good work.

I love the shake-to-vomit feature :)

Amazing work

THIS IS AWESOME I NEED THISSSS

Looks sick!

Another impressive project, love it.

wow this amazing

May be printing the base hemisphere in white helps to get rid of the visible seams through the diffuser. Great project btw!!

this is amazing

Wow, the timing. At the last Hackaday Supercon in November 2023, I chatted with many people about doing a project like this. And POOF you were already steps ahead of me. Well done. I wasn't sure what practical density you'd be able to get with those 1x1mm LEDs. My geometrical approach was going to be different though. Like the MGM sphere, I was planning on doing mylar-based flex pcb, cut into spiral arms (see Fermat's Spiral), but wasn't yet sure how nicely that would lay onto a baseball-sized sphere.

Great project!

Incredible work

Awesome work

Perhaps you can build the hemisphere from the outside in. Take each face of the tessellated hemisphere and extrude them part way towards the center to form a set of truncated polygonal frustrums. Add locating features to the sides of the frustrums (such as pins and holes) so they can be snapped together to form the hemisphere. Glue matching frustrums to the back faces of a tessellated flex PCB with a strong adhesive (such as epoxy), apply clamping pressure (set a weight on top), then wait for adhesive to cure. This is the key step to prevent delamination. Fit adjacent frustrums together to form the hemisphere.

Looks nice, i also have this idea few months ago. And found that there are already has commercial LED Pannels, which is soft, and can do this.

Woo amazing ❤

Great job!!!

This project is great!!

I absolutely love your videos!! LEDs are my jam. I would greatly consider p/urchasing an LED sphere with nearly if not more than a thousand LEDs glowing in there. haha

This is beautiful

From one Carl to another, I genuinely dig this.

Amazing project! liked and subscribed.

love the way you think!

Great work as usual!! 👍👍 Carl you are the best!!👏👏

Very cool project and video!

This is so cool!

I look forward to the release of the micro controller 😍

You could use a circular Display, and fill the dome with oil. That makes it look like the display is directly up against the glass. Some high end mechanical watches use this technique. I am not sure how much thats gonna disturb the image though

Great project! Although not quite the same, but maybe a pico projector would let you increase the resolution while still keeping it small.

I was thinking about something similar to a button to war, and you could show your emotions... but then I started to print different forms and only use a few LEDs to lighten it. My next plan is to use magnets and a little EPROM to tell the controller which form is attached, and the magnets transfer the signals... So I'm really interest how your way works out!

Thanks!

awesome project! i think this would be a cool night light where for potential future features, you can increase the brightness if the user touches/taps it and maybe even make it portable with rechargeable battery

This is awesome

Man I had this kind of Idea for such a long time, but still being in highschool cannot easily act on it , great execution and vido

really cool project

Love this project! Would really love to have one with a proper resolution. Maybe you could use a projector to get a better result…

That was awesome

Great work, as usual.

nice work

good job lil bro

nice build

I love this!

Great Idea, love how it turned out! :)

I had this idea too! I want a handheld version of the Las Vegas sphere so I can run a VR app on it and when I walk around with the sphere, the vr world projected on the surface would move in response. Think of it like inside-out VR.

Great video!

Cool idea, but yes, costs too much if high pixel density is preferred/needed. :( I built something called the “POV LED Globe”. Mine is about 80cm? Diameter made of plexiglass/acrylic with a rotating axis in the middle. There are RGB LEDs on both sides (144 LEDs/m are used for each side.) One side is shifted a few millimeters, so I doubled the pixel density when spinning. In addition, the whole thing is in a vacuum so that there is no/hardly any air resistance and the background noise is also significantly better. The most expensive item in the whole project was the transparent ball at around €120? You can usually get two half-shells cheaply, but in the end they somehow don't look that great with the light refraction in the middle.

this will be a great souvenir

If transparent flexible PCB’s exist, you might be able to double the LED count by printing two boards that stack and use lower profile surface mount components. The bottom one designed so it’s LEDs align with all the gaps on the top board.

Set playback speed at 1.25 to normalize

What a cute Kolobok you made

X'talent. Great work!

YOURE BACK ❤❤❤

Excellent project Carl. 👍😀

AWESOME!!!

You could also try a flexible oled panel. Cool project.

Fantastic work! I would not be surprised if an SE Asia manufacturer uses this as a jumping off point for a more affordable model.

I think you could get way higher resolution for cheaper with: 1) Pico projector in the base pointing up (or using a mirror to point up). 2) fisheye lens above it. 3) empty diffuser dome.

thats incredible man! i loved to watch your video, it caught my attention on the entire thing!, keep with the good work :)

That is insane😮

v nice build, I'd love to see you try your hand at a coil gun considering your knowledge of embedding coils in various types of pcbs and flex circuits

I think realistically scaling it bigger and using an array of small projectors to “rear project” from inside the sphere would work better. The key would be finding an optic that can curve the field of focus to match the interior curvature of the ball, but that may exist already.