Maker Faire 2008: Puzzlemation
posted May 9th 2008 9:00pm by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: cons
[John Peterson] showed us his Puzzlemation, animated tile puzzle at Maker Faire. It was originally designed for the Microchip 16-bit Embedded Control Design Contest. The puzzle is made from multiple modules each with an 8×8 LED grid. The tiles are battery powered and each one has PIC24FJ64GA004 microcontroller. They sit on a tray with flat copper strips as a serial bus. The tray controller broadcasts the animation to the tiles. Each tile waits for its unique identifier and saves that portion of the animation. The tiles don’t actually know what order they’re in so once the animation is in motion you can figure out their proper order; rearranging them so the animation is correct. We’ve got a video of it in action after the break.
There’s more information, and an embedded YouTube video demo at http://www.puzzlemation.com
Posted at 9:21 pm on Feb 28th, 2009 by J. Peterson