LED Juggling Ball

This is the project that ignited in me the passion for functional product design, LED lighting and Digital Fabrication. It is a juggling ball featuring two programmable led strips crossing on the external part of the sphere that create Persistence Of Vision (POV) trail effect when moving.

We designed in-house a custom electronic PCB (full credits of this work to Julien, the engineer took part of this project since inception) featuring ESP32, accelerometer, connectors, UART interface, fast charging. To this board we connected APA102C style led strips with high refresh rate and controlled them by flashing a firmware that originally was based on FastLED with support for BLE and Wifi communication. A prototype of a Flutter control app was also built and used to do basic operations such as changing images, colors, effects.
The project is technically still ongoing even though paused due to the CE certification process that would make the product sellable to a broad market. The ball is currently being tested especially for the safety of the battery an the durability of the led strips. Led strips in fact don’t like at all being bent as the small solder joints can detach from the flexible underlying PCB.
In terms of materials, we tested many: from silicones (using custom molds), to urethane rubbers and we finally went for TPU, also for its ability to be 3D printed. The two halves are joined using either thermo-fusion or using strong PVC glues that create a permanent bonding. 
After countless iterations and designs we arrived to a stable design but the mechanical resistance and protection of the components still remains the biggest challenge: this is an object that can potentially drop from 5/6 meters.

LED Fans

After the led ball experience we decided to integrate the existing board into a product we started to know well: flow fans. This prop is much easier to test because is subject to less continuous mechanical shocks so we could focus more on the software side. So after designing the actual fans I decided to try and add new functionalities to the WLED open source app. I added POV support and generated time-based previews for the existing effects. The synchronization happens via the protocol ESP-NOW. 
Lots of features are still missing but I’m working on them when time allows. The videos below show one of the versions of this app that works via Wifi both from mobile and from desktop.

LED Umbrella

Sometimes I receive requests for custom props and so I built a few led umbrellas for the show company ManosDeFuego, integrating once again WLED and doing all the custom soldering and connections, finally protecting battery and electronics with a 3d printed case. 

Other Props

In addition to designing and building, in the last 5 years up to today I’ve been repairing countless props for people who asked me: led hula hoops, led fans, led poi from different brands. Most of the times the tasks consists in replacing batteries, adding protection BMS circuits, replacing broken USB ports, replacing SMD soldered leds, debugging simple circuit components or bypassing burnt PCB traces.