This 'Fan Wall' Display Shows Off SignalRGB PC Lightning Control
To show off their software's capability, the SignalRGB team built this “Fan Wall” display.
Two decades ago, a tricked-out gaming PC might use a case with a few LEDs. Some of those may have even cycled through red, green, and blue illumination. But the “gamer lights” industry has made incredible progress since then and now the possibilities are endless. Every single component in your case can have its own LED lighting and you can synchronize all of those lights to create cohesive effects. You can even display video across all of the LEDs. The SignalRGB team proved that by building this wall of PC fans that acts like a screen.
SignalRGB is software that coordinates and synchronizes all of the LEDs covering your PC and peripherals. It can, for example, carry an animation over from your keyboard’s LEDs to those on your RAM sticks’ heatsinks. You can pre-program those effects, or make them react in real-time to on-screen media, PC status, audio, and, of course, games. SignalRGB works with components from many different brands, including the Be Quiet! Light Wings fans used for this project.
Light Wings fans are ARGB-lit, like many other gaming fans on the market. They have light rings made up of an impressive 20 LEDs. Though they’re heavily diffused, this means that each fan can supply 20 pixels for the display. The display has a total of 192 fans in a 16 × 12 grid for a total of 3,840 LEDs. They’re arranged in rings and not a neat matrix, but there is still enough fidelity to display recognizable video.
For that to work, the SignalRGB software needed a way to communicate with the fans to control the LEDs. One would normally use the ARGB port on their PC’s motherboard, but this display has too many fans and LEDs for that. So, the SignalRGB team built dedicated controllers that relay commands between the PC and the fans.
The brain of each controller is a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller development board. Each controller also has three Adafruit NeoPXL8 Friend level shifters, an XT60 power connector, and 24 three-pin ARGB cables. As you might guess from that last spec, a single controller can handle 24 fans and so the display required eight of them. It also required eight 650W power supplies.
The SignalRGB team attached all of those fans to vertical panels mounted on a frame made out of aluminum extrusion. The fans cover almost the entire area, but they did leave some room up top for signage advertising Be Quiet! and SignalRGB.
Even though these fans aren’t cooling anything, they do a great job of showcasing the very cool capabilities of SignalRGB. As a demonstration, the SignalRGB team even recreated the Bad Apple video on the Fan Wall.