A few months ago I picked up this vintage bingo board. These old-school bingo displays would be used in large bingo halls to display which numbers were picked such as “B6” or “I 12” The original lightboard was controlled by a James Bond villain kind of rocker switch matrix, a firehouse of wires and 80 fifteen-watt Edison lightbulbs. If you turned on all the lights, the amount of heat radiating from the board would warm up the room and probably give you a sunburn.
My goals for this project were to reduce the weight (this thing weighs a ton!), make it more energy efficient, and add a fun light show. This required the removal of 80 screwed-in ceramic light sockets, the spaghetti bowl of wire, and replacing it with a programmable, addressable LED pixel string.
A programmable Arduino board or an off-the-shelf LED controller such as a Bluetooth, smartphone app-controlled Magic LED controller can control the pixels. The Arduino board provides more flexibility to control a 5 x 16 (80 pixel) matrix but will require more programming. The Magic LED controller provides fast control over the LED pixels but is limited to the 200 included “modes”.
Bill of Materials
- Addressable LED Pixels such the ALITOVE WS2811 12V LED Pixels 100pcs Addressable RGB LED String Lights 12mm Diffused Digital Dream Color Programmable LED Bullet Module Light Waterproof IP68 with 3pin Weatherproof ALT-ConnectorALITOVE WS2811 12V LED Pixels 100pcs
- Power supply – https://amzn.to/3ncNIZl
- Magic controller – https://amzn.to/3LUxtKR
- Alternative controller – Arduino controller board https://amzn.to/40HU3KZ
Note on LED strings
Alitove has two types of spacing on their LED lights – 4-inch and 7-inch. The seven-inch spacing strings are only available in 50-pixel strings but they can be added together. For my project, the 4-inch space pixels were too close together so I need to get two 50-pixel strings of the 7-inch spaced ones.
