LED coffee table

Spark Fun’s centerpiece at Maker Faire back in May was this LED coffee table. They just recently posted about how it was constructed. The surface is made from 64 8×8 RGB LED matrix boards totaling 4096 LEDs. The eight rows are connected to a custom router board so that one SPI line can control the entire display. The main microcontroller is an Olimex LPC2106 dev board. It runs a four player cooperative pong game where multiple balls are added over time. Each player gets a classic Atari paddle for control. You can see a video of the table running a screensaver after the break.

Comments [7]

tagged: arcade, atari, coffeetable, Joystick, led, ledtable, makerfaire, makerfaire2008, rgb, rgbLED, sparkfun

7 Responses to LED coffee table

andrut says:

September 13, 2008 at 6:17 pm

“64 8×8 RGB LED matrix boards totaling 4092″
64x8x8 is 4096, you insensitive clod!

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Eliot Phillips says:

September 13, 2008 at 7:05 pm

@andrut Fixed. That’s what we get for trusting SparkFun’s maths.

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biojae says:

September 13, 2008 at 7:35 pm

no, its not 4096 its 12288. they are RGB matrices, ie 24 x 24 m

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dashdingo says:

September 13, 2008 at 9:50 pm

it’s over 9000.

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portia says:

September 14, 2008 at 3:55 am

Just like to point out that those are not “classic Atari paddles”, but rather classic Atari joysticks.

Paddles look like this:

http://atariace.com/images/atariace.com/atari/images/joysticks/atari_2600_paddles.jpg

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nxk says:

September 14, 2008 at 4:48 am

those aren’t atari _paddles_, they are atari joysticks.
the important difference is that the paddles are analog, the joysticks are digital.

@biojae:
4096 is correct, since they were referring to the number of _rgb_ leds in the project, and it’s pretty common practice to refer to an led package in the singular regardless of the number of actual emitters it may contain inside.