Miniature Vegas Sphere Lights Up the Yard

The Sphere in Las Vegas, Nevada at The Venetian Resort may just be the single most exciting building constructed in the 21st century. If you haven’t seen it, take a moment to go google it. It is an architectural and technological marvel. It is an entertainment arena covered in a huge spherical screen, and looks bonkers in the skyline of the Vegas Strip. It cost more than $2 billion to complete, which is a little outside the budget of most hobbyists. That forced DrZzs & GrZzs to scale things down a bit, but their DIY LED sphere is still very impressive.

DrZzs & GrZzs don’t, unfortunately, provide many details about this project that they’ve dubbed The Pixelhead Megasphere. But it is essentially a small version of the Sphere in Vegas — just without an interior arena. However, it is still very large when compared to most of the projects we feature. It has a diameter of almost 8 feet, though it is shorter than that because the bottom is flat and so it isn’t a complete sphere.

The entire exterior of sphere is covered in individually addressable LEDs. Hackaday reports that there are a total of 20,028 individual LEDs, which require four massive 12V 100A power supplies. Kulp control boards tell the LEDs what to do under the coordination of xLights sequencing software. Those are capable of updating the LEDs fast enough for The Pixelhead Megasphere to display videos, just like the real Vegas Sphere. It can, for instance, show a gigantic animated Eye of Sauron.