LED Matrix Cylinder — a blinkenlights tube

By Boris Landoni on March 19, 2019

We see lots of addressable LED projects, but there was something weirdly charming and very pretty about this cylinder of squares. It’d make for a lovely interactive nightlight in a kids’ room, or for a grown-up lighting feature that you could also use as a news ticker or something that monitors your in-home IoT devices. Once you’ve built something like this, you’re only limited by your imagination — and it’s nice enough to display in your home.

This project is from makeTVee on Instructables. The cleverness is in the layout and the really meticulous execution: vertical strips of LEDs form a cylinder in a laser-cut frame, with a very thin layer of wood veneer glued around the whole thing to act as a diffuser. It’s simple, but really rather beautiful and very effective.

In the case to the side is the Raspberry Pi Zero that’s driving the whole thing. Here it is doing its thing:

LED matrix cylinder WS2812 Raspberry Pi Zero

LED matrix cylinder based on WS2812 LEDs and some laser cutter parts. https://hackaday.io/project/162035-led-matrix-cylinder https://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Matrix-Cylinder/ #WS2812 #LEDcylinder

makeTVee has built a Pygame-based simulator of the whole matrix so you can program it to do exactly what you want: scroll marquee text, make pretty patterns, twinkle at random, display images: the world’s your (pixellated) oyster. The code’s available at GitHub.

Thanks, makeTVee — if you’d like to leave your real name below, we’ll credit you properly here!

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About Boris Landoni

Boris Landoni is the technical manager of Open-Electronics.org. Skilled in the GSM field, embraces the Open Source philosophy and its projects are available to the community.