Bring the disco to your home bar with this cool idea.

It’s becoming very apparent that I’m a sucker for LED projects lately 🙂

This guy’s bar features 128 RGB LEDs and over 250 feet of wire to create an incredibly flexible display under the surface of his home bar. The LEDs are computer-controlled and can be programmed to reproduce any pattern you like.

The construction is pretty interesting. Each LED is in a square “pocket” and the bottom of the pocket has a bit of aluminum foil to create the non-uniform lighting effect.

Unfortunately, the technical details are pretty light, but other than the concept and the construction, the details should not be overly difficult if you wanted to replicate something like this. Higher resolution photos are about all that’s available at this time and they can be found at the creator’s site.

In one of his photos, you can see what appear to be professionally made circuit boards which control the LEDs. They appear to be connected to the computer via USB and presumably perform high-speed PWM (pulse width modulation) to achieve the varied brightness for each of the red, green, and blue segments of each LED.

I’d imagine that the software to control the LEDs could be a bit tricky, especially if you attempted to write it such that it was “productized” and had an easy-to-use programming interface. Doing simple one-off, fully custom programs for each pattern would be easier most likely. Again, this is one aspect I wish there were more details on, perhaps with some screenshots of the programming interface to see how it’s done.