[David] hand soldered a Blinky ball… and you can too!

This is a blinky ball that [David] designed, built, and programmed himself. Does it look familiar? It should, he took his inspiration from the original prototype, and the Hackerspace-produced derivative. [David’s] version is not as small, or as blinky, but in our minds the development process is the real reason for building something like this. He took a great idea and figured out how he could pull it off while pushing his skill set, staying within his time and budget constraints.

The project is powered by an Arduino nano which resides in the core of the ball. [David] used protoboard sourced locally for each of the slices, soldering green LEDs along the curved edges, and added shift registers to drive them. The ball is driven by a LiPo battery which can power it for about 45 minutes. You can see the animation designs he coded in the clip after the break.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2yADpGnyyc

Comments

  1. Ren says:

    I thought the accelerometer or whatever that determines movement was a neat idea. But the video had too much yawn time.

  2. robot sea urchin will ruin your beach parties! do not let the lights draw you into the electrified ocean

  3. charliex says:

    David, looks cool man 🙂

  4. NewCommentor1283 says:

    excellent job man, its awesome!

    til recently i wondered what a hand made version would look like, if i had the funds, i would make one too, and apparently it looks great! i was worried something as complex mechanically
    (boards attached at weird angles and weight on it)
    would fail to look anything like other then a mess.

    … if you didnt mind using them with patternes/graphics that use a minimal amount of on-leds per frame
    (umm, 3d sphere video isnt reallly available for download rofl)
    then the battery would last longer.

    then do soemthing with multiple balls having multiple colors. AND SYNCED XD

    • NewCommentor1283 says:

      by download i was talking about downloading A VIDEO,,, in 3d,,, not cube/rectangle 3d,,, but sphere3d…

      • NewCommentor1283 says:

        edit: if theres already some sort of sphere3D file-format “standard” ALREADY, then, well, i dont know what to say. lol

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