Spidey Wall

Euan Lind has done some amazing designs for our house renovation and one of my favourites is the Spidey Wall. It’s a little tricky to get a full view of it as it is on a short staircase but the overall effect close-to is dramatic. The design is intended to evoke Spider-Man’s costume (it’s in my son Joe’s room) and each shape has individually addressable coloured LEDs around. In total there are almost 2000 LEDs in the wall.

Spidey Wall AssemblyThe construction Spidey Wall Preparationis from MDF which was CNC machined to create each of the shapes. The design includes a recess around each shape to hide the LED strips.

Another problem was in correctly positioning each of the shapes as we had not included any location holes in them. This proved quite a challenge and in the end was solved by trial and error.

It took a really long time (2 or 3 people working for at least four weeks solidly) to attach all the LED strips and make all of the power and data connections.  But now that it is finished I have a few ideas for games and other things that could be done with it.

Phoebe registering the shapes Testing the strips Phoebe working on assembly

One of the difficulties was powering the whole array – several cables had to be run to ensure enough power to maintain full brightness – the whole strip fully illuminated consumes around 60A ( 5V) so we had to use a pretty beefy power supply and cabling.