I was suggested a video on YouTube where someone built a led sphere and thought, I can make that and thought that I could work on my understanding of spherical coordinates in the programming. I designed the whole project in Solidworks, and 3D printed any tools needed for forming components. the size of the sphere is arbitrary as I went for a size that I thought would be aesthetically pleasing and could fit an Arduino and battery. The LEDs are 5050 RGBW, commonly referred to as neopixels. there are 186 LEDs set in 10 rings. The steel rings that hold the LEDs also act as power rails, while the small bits between them are used as the data line. The rings were made on two mandrels, the first one sized smaller than the needed diameter as the steel deformed both in the elastic and plastic range. the second ring was the appropriate diameter and had a slit to accommodate the saw used to cut the rings. Everything was held together with solder. The sphere was assembled in two halves, each using a four-part mold to hold the LEDs until soldered to the rings. If all the LEDs are on at full brightness, the power draw is 15 watts, however, the battery has a maximum output of 3.3 Watts so the maximum brightness is well below the maximum. The first microcontroller I used was an Arduino nano but I switched over to an Adafruit feather rp2040 as I wanted to try to use micro python and the new raspberry pi pico controller. All the Led's addresses and coordinates are stored in an array so with two angles you can point to which LED to turn on. An IMU gyro is used for gesture control to change the lighting mode. As this project is still in the works, the sphere currently only goes through different flashing routines and one that should point in the direction of gravity.

Most photos from the assembly process were lost due to storage corruption.

code: https://github.com/Engineermanx2/LED-Sphere