This Glowing Polyhedron Proves That Disco Ain’t Dead
Proving that disco ain’t dead, Tim built this DIY smart disco ball.
The disco ball is an iconic piece of party paraphernalia. But though disco is still very much alive, thank you very much, disco balls aren’t exactly hip anymore. That leaves something missing from the atmosphere of roller rinks and dance clubs around the world. But mirrored orbs were low-tech and a little boring anyway. So to bring life back to the scene, Tim threw a bunch of LEDs into a translucent polyhedron to make this DIY smart disco ball.
This does a fantastic job of capturing the essence of a classic disco ball, but in a fun, new, technologically advanced sort of way. Instead of simply reflecting light in a boring and passive manner, this emits light in all kinds of interesting patterns. It is packed with RGB LEDs and users can choose from pre-programmed animations, a sound-reactive mode, and even a mode that detects colors in the room and responds accordingly. If you can’t help but boogie in the presence of colorful light and four-on-the-floor beats, then this will keep you hustlin’ all night long.
The outer shell of this DIY smart disco ball is laser-cut 3mm-thick acrylic. That attaches to an inner frame structure made of laser-cut plywood. The light comes from a strip of WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs. There are a lot of LEDs and they require a lot of power, so this uses two 5V 10A power supplies. A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B controls the LEDs, setting their colors and brightness according to pre-programmed animations or real-time parameters.
To make this responsive to the rhythm of ABBA and The Bee Gees, the Raspberry Pi listens to the world through a USB microphone. Tim doesn’t provide a lot of detail about how that works, but we assume that it looks for low frequencies that correspond to bass and triggers certain LEDs when it hears those. It can also respond to the light in the room thanks to a Raspberry Pi camera module. That detects the dominate color in the video frame and sets the LEDs to match. This feature is clever, because it lets the DIY smart disco ball mesh with other light sources without explicit configuration.
There are many people in this world that don’t appreciate disco (because they’re wrong). But those that do will see the obvious benefit of this project.
