Digital Sand is a Mesmerizing Display of Physics and LEDs

These “digital physics toys” are simply stunning. I first saw one when I was in Rome and ran into Mike from Mike’s Electric Stuff. He had this cylinder full of tiny LEDs that simulated falling particles.

At the time, he said people loved it everywhere they’d seen it, but he hadn’t made any plans to release a build. Luckily, Phil Burgess from Adafruit stepped up and shared the files to easily recreate this toy with Adafruit hardware (at a fairly cheap price too). Then, the Ruiz Brothers (Pedro and Noe) took it a step further by creating a really nice enclosure with some special features.

Ooh, so cool! From @mikelectricstuf pic.twitter.com/OJypMyt8fR

— Caleb Kraft (@calebkraft) December 2, 2017

Check out the entire build on Adafruit’s Learning System.