Old LED marquee turned embedded video player

driving-led-marquee-with-rpi

[Sprite_TM] is was sent an old LED Marquee by an anonymous fan of his hacking projects. The display isn’t full color, but it’s large — 224 by 48 pixels — and he figured he could render some okay images with the bi-color diodes. In the end, he replaced the controller and turned it into a video player.

The original … Read the rest

Perpetual pong

perpetual-pong

[Jeff Joray] wrote in to show off this perpetual Pong device he built. The six by ten LED matrix acts as a game board for Pong but there are no controls. The board simply plays against itself. It’s pretty much a pong clock without the clock.

The brain of the device is a PIC 16F684 which drives the six … Read the rest

Prototyping a modular LED matrix

led-matrix-modular-prototype

[Will] was toying with the idea of creating a scrolling LED marquee to display messages as his wedding in May. But you’ve got to crawl before you can walk so he decided to see what he could do with the MAX7219 LED driver chips. They do come in a DIP package, but the 24-pin 0.1″ pitch chip will end up … Read the rest

LED marquee uses discrete through-hole lights

through-hole-led-marquee

[Michael] built his own LED marquee using individual diodes. Despite his choice to forego the 8×8 or 5×7 modules we often see in these projects, his decision to spin a dedicated PCB saved him a lot of trouble during assembly. Sure, he still had to solder 180 leads on the 9×18 grid of lights, but at least he didn’t … Read the rest

8×8 LED matrix pendant sealed in a block of epoxy

8x8-led-pendant

This is the back side of [Dmitry Grinberg's] 8×8 LED matrix pendant. He had seen the other projects that used a 5×7 grid but wasn’t really satisfied with the figures that can be drawn in that confined area when each pixel has only the option of being on or off. His offering increases the drawing area and includes the … Read the rest

Halloween Props: a spooky mirror

This mirror will spook your guests with a variety of static and animated images. It includes a proximity sensor so the images will not appear until someone comes close enough to see themselves in the looking glass.

The electronic parts are quite easy to put together. There is a 32×32 RGB LED matrix mounted on the back of the mirror. … Read the rest

TinyMatrix derivative uses PIC instead of AVR

[Stu] has a teenage niece whose birthday is coming up and he wanted to give her something unique as a gift. He’s working on an LED matrix pendant that can display pixel graphics, play animations, and scroll messages.

He began the work after drawing inspiration from the TinyMatrix project. That clever design uses a DIP AVR chip soldered directly … Read the rest