Animated 8×8 LED Toy

picxie

It’s been a while since we’ve featured a hardware project and I thought this one looked pretty simple. It was originally intended as a Christmas ornament. If you follow the schematics and burn the provide source you’ll end up with an 8×8 animated display. Not really sure what your going to do with it after that, but a flashing sign is sure to clue in the general populace to your dorkitude.

[thanks camzmac]

15 thoughts on “Animated 8×8 LED Toy

  1. doesn’t look too bad.. might try it with some picaxe chips i have lying around.. hook it up to a serial port or something… nice cheap-assed screen instead of forkin out for an lcd.. :D…(yeah i know u can get lcd for about

  2. Does anyone know of a complete howto for a bigger LED array display powered by either the parallel or serial port? I’d like to see an RGB version, too. I guess I’m looking for something more than “Get a bunch of octal buffers and hook ’em up to the parallel port with LEDs!” What size/power draw LEDs? Do I need transistors to boost current? What sort of software can I use? How many LEDs can the matrix be?

    Any ideas guys?

  3. try building one of those things that you spin and it makes a message. Will there be a hackaday thing this afternoon where they give us more links? I cant get enough hackaday.

  4. This is the stuff i have been looking,being a begineer this looks easy(i might be wrong). I have done a similar stuff in java, jus in software; an array of circles that change color depending on you input, not down to hardware.Can this be programmed with java?I am a novice talking………..

  5. AH! the perfect LED monitor for my sub-$100 laptop!

    (refer to my comment yesterday)

    (yes, i’m joking… though it could probably work… anyone that wants to take the idea, knock yourself out)

  6. I may have a go at this one. I love electronics projects an want to give a PIC project a go. You can build a simple programmer using a serial port and a few components. It’s the programming of the PIC and the compiler to compile the code to HEX that you need to find.

    In regards to RGB LED dislays, they are used for large advertisement displays and are in fact made up of standard 5mm LED’s. For example here in the UK, at Picadilly Circus in London they are used for advertisements. I’m not sure how feasible it would be to make a small scale one, you’d still need a huge amount of LED’s and it would only work when viewed from a few meters away.

  7. I built somthing like this years and years ago but I used it for a digital ociliscope. It used a decade counter for the scan and a bar graph meter chip to provide ‘deflection’. It worked pretty darn well. I don’t think the bar graph chips are avaliable any more but if you find a copy of the big yellow Forrest Mimms book you can try to build it. I wish that I had programmable devices like a PIC back in the 80’s…

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