Ping Pong Pixels by ObsoleteNerd

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

Introduction
Ping Pong Pixels are a modular clickable chassis for creating easy RGB lighting decorations for your room/home.
There's a "Matrix" chassis for making flat matrix displays of any dimension you want (photos show 3x3 and a 5x2 wider style), and there's a "Cylinder" chassis for making Decagon based cylindrical lamps.
They click together with no glue and have optional back covers (for some common shapes) to hide the electronics or stop prying fingers.
I'll update this page with better assembly instructions and photos soon, it's a work in progress but I've built multiple different shapes so far and the general modular system works great.
Basic Instructions
If you want a 5 wide 2 high lamp like the rainbow one in the photos:
Print 10 "Matrix Chassis" pieces and 13 "Clip" pieces. Refer to the photos for how to click them together but no glue is required.
Cut holes in your ping ping balls the same size as the holes in the chassis pieces, hot glue the ping pong balls to the chassis pieces then click your WS2811 lights in from behind (no glue required here either).
You can optionally print the "5x2 Rear Cover" piece (or the 3x3 one if you went that route) to cover up the electronics, but it will hold together fine without the rear cover too.
Connect your microcontroller of choice (I use ESP8266's with WLED flashed onto them) and you're done.
I'm working on better photos and a full blog post detailing the builds, with code and wiring diagrams. I'll edit the link in here when it's done.