Comments on: Gameboy color on an LED matrix

By: Natho

Natho — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:42:49 +0000

@ kevtris (or anyone else who knows about such things):

How did you manage to get the video signal out of the Gameboy Colour you were using? I’ve been having a look at trying to get a video out of one, and it seems like the only way is to take out the screen and mess with the wires underneath; is this the tactic you used, or is there another way?

- N

By: nitroray

nitroray — Sun, 24 May 2009 11:33:26 +0000

How long do leds live ?

By: strider_mt2k

strider_mt2k — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:49:51 +0000

This is an awesome project.
Well done, and thanks for the game ideas too. :)

By: Sam

Sam — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:16:53 +0000

Though it’s tempting to do the calculations on power consumption knowing that the final output requires 1kw of energy and the number of LEDs, one has to factor in resistance.

I’m certain that the LEDs aren’t all wired together with gold conductors, so there is probably a lot of energy being lost to heat.

It’s a really cool hack, despite the huge consumption, and it does qualify as a hack as opposed to some of the projects that show up on hackaday lately, anyway.

Kudos to Kevtris!

By: j s

j s — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:40:03 +0000

I used to follow this guy’s projects very closely; he’s an electrical engineer by trade and a darn good one.

By: Caleb Kraft

Caleb Kraft — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:19:17 +0000

Thanks for the input kevtris. I’ve updated the post to include a link to your blog.

By: kevtris

kevtris — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:49:10 +0000

Thanks for the kind words about my project. I REALLY want to make this thing full size, which would be 192*144 LEDs, but I have to get ahold of 4 more of the boards. I could only buy 13 of them, and I got 12 working. one had too much damage and I needed parts to fix the other 12 anyways.

A full array would be 16 boards. (8*2) Each board is 72*24 LEDs.

Refresh is 1/12th duty cycle, and it really does take a huge amount of power to run them all. I used 16 power supplies to run the whole mess, and made a custom controller for it.

There’s pictures and stuff on my blog about the construction with pics of the supplies and stuff.

I have some other videos up of my earlier testings and debug and stuff if you view my other videos.

Also, yes it really does take about 1KW to run, and if I had all 16 boards running I would be seriously straining the capacity of a standard US wall outlet.

By: xirtamdel

xirtamdel — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:19:21 +0000

What, no Zelda DX? FAIL.
no, really, it’s neat.

By: nick

nick — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:53:48 +0000

this hack is pure gold. A+

By: MaterialDefender

MaterialDefender — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:24:50 +0000

Metroid II, Crazy Castle III, Tetris…I think I still have these games…

Awesome matrix!

By: Joel

Joel — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:11:18 +0000

Now time to make one out of surface mount leds.

By: deekwan

deekwan — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:28:55 +0000

This is one hell of a project. I wish I have the time, money and skills (debug and solder SMD) to do something like that. I still have my 40x 8×8 red LED matrix waiting for me to finish them up. Kudos to Kevin.

By: peter

peter — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:20:12 +0000

Why stop at a 480×272 display? why not go all out and go 1920×1080 for a full 1080P resolution? of course a display that size would be 31.5feet by 17.7″(36.1feet diagonal!) when using 5mm RGB LED’s but still why stop at PSP resolution? – Peter

By: Mike Collins

Mike Collins — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:27:57 +0000

up next, 480×272 for PSP!

By: treg

treg — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 19:12:34 +0000

>1kW for 20736 LEDs is nearly 50mW per LED. That must be one hell of a bright display (or just REALLY inefficiently driven).

It is 50mW per led, which is only 17mW per die. On standard ultra bright red die run at 25mA for 2V, whih is 50mW (for 150mW for white RGB light).

Also, the leds are certainly muliplexed. If they are pulse and get 100 time more current during 1/100 of the time, they will look really less bright than if they’d get normal current during the whole time. So I really don’t think that it will blind you.