I've been wanting to make an animated world map for a long time, like the ones you see in movies on the walls of the CIA headquarters (or in the rooms of madmen who want to conquer the world!)
![](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/8253581681642461208.jpg)
In order to light up the capitals and major cities, I needed at least 200 lights.
Leds?
I immediately thought of LEDs, but these were the main contraindications:
- the dimensions of the leds, especially the RGB ones, were too high and would have covered the writing with the texts of the cities, forcing me to choose a very large format map, for which it is very expensive to find a suitable frame.
![](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/527891681642531739.png)
- fixing 200 or more led-holders would have been complicated, as well as soldering them one by one (2 wires per led = 400 connections!
- driving every single LED with a microcontroller would have forced me to use a very complex electronic circuitry, with shift registers.
Optical fibers
Walking through a shopping mall during the holidays, looking at a fiber optic Christmas tree, I finally had the inspiration I was looking for: why not take advantage of fiber optics? Why not transmit light?
![](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/911801681642604563.png)
Here are the advantages of this choice:
- small size: the fiber has a diameter of 0.75mm
- lightness and ease of installation: just drill and give a small dot of vinyl glue
- no soldering: a job within the reach of all hobbyists and not just electronics!
- possibility of using the fantastic WS2812B RGB LEDs as a light source, with their libraries for Arduino IDE: for example, using the 8x8 RGB matrices, with which I was able to create a 32x8 display with scrolling writing to make the world map more interactive!
![](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/6692501681642789184.png)
OpticalShow project.
![](https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/4875171681642907793.png)
This choice led me to create the OpticalShow project: a 3D printed mask to be combined with an 8x8 matrix, through which each single RGB LED of the matrix transmits its light to the optical fiber.
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