Comments on: Guest Post: LEDs and Ping-Pong Balls to Replace 10W Sign Bulbs

By: J. Peterson

J. Peterson — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 22:41:46 +0000

Cort - I'd love to hear how they work out if you get a chance to use them. The balls are available in various sizes up to 1", though I don't know if light loss is an issue at larger sizes.

By: Cort Buffington (n0mjs)

Cort Buffington (n0mjs) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:02:54 +0000

I bought my colored ping pong balls from glowstickfactory.com. They were not economically priced, but I was able to get the small quantity I needed for testing.

And thanks for the tip on the polypropylene balls J. Peterson! I’m going to go look at them. I’m specifically chasing a 10w sign-bulb replacement right now, so 3/4″ is a bit small, but still worth looking at for other projects. Sounds very promising.

By: uhe

uhe — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 11:49:27 +0000

Where do you get the (colored) ping-pong balls from? I’m looking for a source for 300+ balls..

I saw a LED-matrix with ping-pong balls on a french website. They solved the diffusing problem by ‘not drilling into the balls’. This way the bottom of the balls are used as first diffusing stage.

By: J. Peterson

J. Peterson — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 09:24:51 +0000

One diffuser I've had promising results with is 3/4" solid polypropylene balls. This is more or less the same plastic milk jugs are made of, and is very diffuse - it does a good job of mixing RGB colors. They're $0.10/each from US Plastic. I still need to come up with a nice way of drilling holes in them (some sort of drill press jig) and mounting them, but basic test results looked very good. Much less overall light loss than the ping-pong balls. The rod stock is another possibility that might be easier to work with.