LED Wall

The Project

Our project is a LED Wall built and assembled entirely by us. It contains 1024 programmable LEDS, with 32 on each side. In total, it is about 2 feet by 2 feet. However, the LED Wall is composed of four individual panels. Each panel is 16 by 16 LEDS, or 256 in total. The backing of the wall is 0.25” plywood. On top of the plywood, the panels all have 16 LED strips laid out and glued in rows. Each LED strip is soldered using jumper wire to the one below it, and connected in the middle, in an alternating or snakelike fashion. These connections allow for the LED Wall to be programmed as a whole unit by a single controller. The LED strips are covered by a laser cut wooden grid. Each pixel of the grid corresponds to one LED. Then, diffuser paper was cut and glued on top of the wooden grid. The grid prevents individual LED lights from bleeding into one another, while the diffuser smooths the pattern. The LEDs are programmed by an ESP-36 microcontroller using the WLED software. This allows us to display patterns, text, images, and animations on the wall.

View this project on vimeo

Team Comments

We originally chose to make this project to showcase the creativity, innovation, and skill of Ninjas at our local CoderDojo. Our CoderDojo was planning to have a float in our local Christmas Parade, so we made an LED Wall for the trailer, where it could display animations and say “Happy Holidays!”

We faced many challenges during this project. We often had to redesign components, such as the wooden grid. There are few projects similar to ours, so we had to create our own solutions for much of the project, like how to solder & code. We worked it out by innovating, failing, & trying again.

If we had more time, we would revise our process using what we know now to make building the panels simpler. We would also try out new programs for the LED display, such as interactive games or animations that respond to sound. The LED Wall has lots of potential that we’d love to explore further.