This Interactive FadeCandy LED Dome Is Perfect for Your Next EDM Dance Party

Blinky lights and EDM go together like [redacted drug reference] and, well, EDM. Something about the bright, flashing colors just makes electronic dance music all the more fun to bop along to — or however you’re supposed to dance these days. Breakdancing or something, maybe? Anyway, if that’s your thing, Amy Goodchild’s awesome tutorial will walk you through how to build an interactive FadeCandy LED dome that’s perfect for your next dance party.

When in Domeis a 4.2 meter (about 14 foot) geodesic dome with the interior covered in 4,378 individually-addressable LEDs. I imagine that dancing inside the dome probably makes one feel like they’ve been transported into a David Guetta music video. Goodchild designed and built When in Dome as the final project for her Master’s degree in Design for Performance and Interactive at the Interactive Architecture Lab of the University College London Bartlett School of Architecture.

Goodchild has also made the plans available, so you can build your own! The structure of the geodesic dome is constructed using a hub kit from Build with Hubs, which is designed specifically to be easy to assemble. The finished dome is made up of 33 triangular panels, and those are split into 11 sets of three panels each. Each set of three gets 512 LEDs and one Adafruit FadeCandy LED controller.

Programming the LED controllers is where it gets quite complicate, but Goodchild provides a thorough explanation. The FadeCandy server needs to be setup with an accurate map of the LED layout, which is handled by a dymaxion map that unfolds the 3D shape into a 2D surface map. Processing is then used to coordinate animations. A Kinect Sensor is used to make those animations interactive. The result is a beautiful LED dome that is well-suited to your next EDM breakdancing battle.