Bitluni’s Newest Ping Pong LED Wall Is Very Impressive

Display types like LCDs and OLEDs are very practical on the scale of consumer electronics, as they offer extremely high quality images at relatively affordable prices. But they stop being so affordable once they’re larger than a typical TV. Moreover, huge displays rarely need the kind of pixel density that something like an LCD screen offers — you’re generally going to be too far away to see that detail anyway. That’s why LED displays are ideal at large scales. Bitluni has been working on designing large LED displays with ping pongs to diffuse the light, and the third iteration is the most impressive one yet.

The first and second versions of the Ping Pong LED Wall were fantastic, but the focus for those was on affordability. The Ping Pong LED Wall v3, on the other hand, was developed with quality and convenience in mind. That meant reducing the labor required for assembly as much as possible, while simultaneously improving the consistency of the LEDs. The earlier versions of the Ping Pong LED Wall were wired by hand, which was cheap to do but very labor intensive. This new version is instead divided up into multiple panels, each of which is a professionally fabricated and assembled PCB containing a grid of SK6812 individually-addressable RGBW LEDs.

In addition to the PCBs containing the LEDs, Bitluni also designed a handful of power and signal distribution boards that further improve the ease of assembly. The only real downside of this setup is that those PCBs are large and can be quite expensive to fabricate. This build contains a total of 1,920 individual LEDs, but that can be scaled up or down depending how much you want to spend on panels. All of those LEDs are controlled by an ESP32 board, which has enough processing power to maintain more than 74 frames per second. Bitluni developed a custom Arduino library to drive the LEDs and to provide an interface for displaying video graphics and animations. This particular Ping Pong LED Wall cost several hundred dollars to construct, but that’s pretty reasonable given how large it is and how easy it is to assemble.