We thought the Meggy had some serious potential. The open serial port is ripe for the plucking, but has thus far been fairly unused. Here’s directions on how to make your own serial cable capable of connecting two Meggies. Basically, it is just modifying an audio cable, used to connect CDROMs to the motherboard. The cool thing about this is that the resulting crossover cable should work on any Arduino that is programmed via an FTDI cable.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have just announced the release of the Meggy Jr RGB, a fully programmable handheld console with an 8×8 RGB LED matrix display. Like its big sisters Peggy and Peggy 2.0, the Meggy Jr is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller and is made up of a bank of fully addressable LEDs. Unlike its siblings, the device boasts six buttons and the ability to be mounted inside of a custom case (or “handle set”) constructed from plastic or wood, drastically altering the look of the console. Using the popular open-souce Arduino environment, users are able to write custom software for the device. While it works great as a game console, of the many possible configurations and suggested uses, we think “disco floor for your Lego minifigurines” is the most amusing.