Raspi-controlled RGB LED Strip Display

snake

[4RM4] over at the Stuttgart hackerspace Shackspace ran into a guy selling individually addressable RGB LED strips when he attended the 29th Chaos Communication Congress last December. He had a Raspberry Pi with him, and after a little bit of work he rigged up an LED display that wrapped around a trash can. A respectable hack, but not quite ready for prime time.

After getting back to the Shackspace, [4RM4] decided to go in a more classic direction by building an RGB Snake clone. A few neat features were implemented like a high score list, a free play bot, and a clock.

To control his pixel-munching snake, [4RM4] used a Wii Nunchuck controller hooked up to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. It looks like a whole lot of fun, and given the absurdly high scores shown in the video after the break, it looks like this build is getting a lot of use at the Shackspace.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO47IX9lz-s&w=580]

14 thoughts on “Raspi-controlled RGB LED Strip Display

    1. Ebay, HL1606 RGB LED strip. Though the HL1606 can’t be dimmed very easily, you basically have on/off. There are better ones from adafruit that use a different chip (LPD8806), but they are considerably more expensive. I paid 40€ including shipping for 5m of HL1606 5050 RGB from china, whereas the LPD8806 are $30/m from adafruit.

      http://adafruit.com/products/306

    1. of course the high score may be due to the tendency of people to compete with each other, someone gets the high score and brags about having the high score, then somebody decides to beat it and the process repeat itself and the score keeps getting higher and higher

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