There are already countless projects that utilize individually addressable RGB LED strips in some way or another, except most of them lack a “wow” factor. This is one problem that Philipp Niedermayer’s Sphere² Lamp does not suffer from, as it is a giant sphere comprised of 122 smaller domes (cut ping pong balls) that are each lit by their own LED. The project uses an Arduino Nano running code with the FastLED library to output signals via its GPIO pins to the LEDs. It is controlled over its serial interface by a Nano 33 BLE Sense since the latter has integrated BLE functionality. 

Niedermayer also wrote a dedicated app for starting and stopping animations on the Sphere² Lamp. The Android application features an interface that lets users control not only the selected color or colors, but the brightness and the speed at which the animation plays as well. Currently, the app has a set of around both 10 animations and color palettes each, although this number can certainly be increased in the future. 

The Sphere² Lamp is an extremely unique-looking showcase of what is capable with just a couple of Arduino boards, some LED strips, and innovative programming. You can view the project’s write-up here on Hackster.io and see its code on GitHub.