Archive for April, 2010

GOLidascope

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

I’ve decided to go ahead with it. Here are 8 strips of 7 circuit boards, each holding a 10 x 7 array. The strips will be arranged in an octagon, so that’ll mean 56 pixels around the inside and 70 pixels in length.

Open comments disabled

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

…because I’m getting spammed. Sorry about that. Who am I talking to exactly?

Conway’s Game of Life on a LED Matrix

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Following on from a previous post, here’s Conway’s Game Of Life rendered on a 10×7 LED Matrix (the same on as I used here). I haven’t decided if I’m going to do the whole GOLidascope yet.

Download a video

The Atmel ATMega169 on the back is the sole component; it’s handing the algorithm and the display multiplexing and running off its own internal 8MHz oscillator. Since there are no dedicated high current drivers and the chip can only handle so much current, a maximum of 2 LEDs per display are illuminated at any one time. The display is flicker free but there is a small variation in the brightness of the LEDs under some circumstances.

The displays are ancient (1998) bicolor Kingbright matrices I got off Ebay several years ago. I have a few hundred in the basement.

There are just enough pins left to enable the module to communicate with 4 neighbors so it’ll build up quite nicely if I do a bunch of them.

Today’s Brush With Fame and Disaster

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

The Fame

The Disaster (click here for the story)

These photos were taken within 10 minutes of each other. This is New York in a nutshell.

Outrage!

Friday, April 2nd, 2010