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I mentioned to a friend at work how I'd like to build a wall lamp with ping pong balls that not only lit up, but could be any color, and he brought in his "StrobeFX" to let me have a look at an idea that uses the concept. StrobeFX is a rubberized ping pong ball on the end of a flexible stick. A battery and control box powers an RGB LED inside the ball, allowing it to change between a variety of colors. You can pick a number of different strobe and fade patterns, then swing the stick all around to paint streaks of multicolored light in the air. It gave me hope that the ping pong ball lamp could look awesome. It was quite a striking sight.
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Soon after playing with the StrobeFX, I bought 288 balls (2 gross) for about $16 on Ebay. I figured that was a good number to start with. They turned out to be extremely cheap - very poorly made, with irregular/mismatched seams, slightly oblong shapes, some had what might be dark, dried mold in the seams, a few were dented, and all had extremely varying wall thickness, making certain sides almost paper thin, and others quite thick, meaning none of them will roll in a straight line. Some won't roll at all, opting to wobble in place. Still, they worked for my simple lighting ideas, so it was a bargain. Here's a dented one I found on the top of the pile and cut a hole in to test lighting it from the inside with a bright red LED.
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Without an inner diffusion screen, the light from the LED concentrates on the front of the ball, creating a bright spot surrounded by rings.
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Putting the LED on the back of a solid ball created the perfect glow I remembered from the StrobeFX. I'm extremely glad not to have to drill holes in all the ping pong balls.
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Of course I had to play with the simple geometry of the ping pong balls.
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If you've ever wondered what 256 ping pong balls would look like, this is it. I've definitely been interested in "the grid" for awhile, and in the idea behind pixels - putting a grid of something together to create a perceived image. 16x16 is a very small grid, but it's already 256 individual ping pong balls (of 288 ordered). This hand-spaced grid is about 29" (73.66cm) square. Ping pong balls are 1.5" (3.81cm) wide, so pushed together, this would make a grid 24" (60.96cm) wide each way. I like the idea of a perfect 2' square - that figure has shown up in other lamp designs of mine. I'm not sure yet if I want a grid lamp, though, or maybe something more organic, and hence, harder to build, which may decide for me that this should remain a simple grid layout.
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Increasing the difficulty is the idea of putting an RGB LED behind each ball. Each RGB is really 3 LEDs on a single chip, requiring 3 full circuits - one each for its red, green, and blue components. That makes for 1024 individual circuits that must be accounted for. It's certainly doable, but it's more than a small pain. You can think of the idea as a very low-resolution TV, where a small 16x16 pixel section has been blown up so that each pixel is ping pong ball sized (and shaped).
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It'll be awhile until all the elements - learning more electronics, experimenting, buying the parts necessary, figuring out how to mount 256 balls (I have the design, but not the particulars), developing the software, testing it, etc... - come together into a future-thinking retro lamp. For now, I wanted to see what 16x16 looked like, and I learned some things in the process of laying them out. For one thing, I have a much keener sense now of the size of the number 256, and a healthy fear of anything larger.
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Because it's difficult to keep track of which ball moves where in this animated gif of two views of the ball array from different angles, your mind splits the plane irregularly, creating the feeling of many separately rotating sections. Don't look too long if you're seizure-prone, and if you have any kind of web trickery that disables animated gifs, that's why this image isn't moving for you.
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