One of the more impressive projects a home-bound tinkerer can pull off is some sort of display. Not only does the final project result in a lot of blinky, glowey things, but driving hundreds of LEDs is an achievement in itself. [Fabien] decided he wanted to build his own LED display and ended up with something great (French, Google translation).
Instead of going off the deep end and making his own boards for this giant LED display, [Fabien] found a very cheap 16×32 LED display board on DealExtreme. Once these kits were pieced together, [Fabian] mounted them in a wooden frame and started connecting the displays together.
The original plan was to drive these with an Arduino, but with so many pixels he quickly ran out of RAM. Replacing the Arduino with a larger ATMega1284p, [Fabian] found the RAM he needed and started work on some interesting visualizations.
Of course, Conway’s Game of Life made a showing in the final build, but [Fabian] also managed to whip up a spectrograph using FFT. It’s a very nicely put together display that makes us want to buy a few of these displays ourselves.
Here the link with latest demonstration videos (Game of life, FFT and video streaming) :
http://skyduino.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/code-demo-matrices-de-leds-diytj/
Well done, very impressive!
not to be a dick (I am not a native speaker of English myslef) but since English is a kind of lingua franca these days and this site is in English wouldn’t it be easier if we all agree to use it. Besides you don’t really expect them to be able to learn foreign languages, do you (There are other countries than the US and A ?!?) :-D ??
the web is worldwide, and not everyone is using english.
we wine drinkers and frog eaters learnt english as a foreign language, so please forgive us when we’re using our native language in our blogs :)
I guess we should switch to Mandarin.
BTW very nice project.
Too bad they’re RGY LEDs instead of RGB. If some company would start popping out affordable RGB matrix modules with 4x the number of LEDs per module, that would be a most excellent development.
Or even modules with the same number of LEDs as these, but RGB.
Adafruit sells 16×32 RGB LED “remainder” panels from companies that make video walls. $40 a panel is not unreasonable for an RGB panel that size. They’re out of stock right now, but apparently expect more in a week or two.
http://www.adafruit.com/products/420
Or you can order the same panel from china for $20 shipped. (check aliexpress).
In case you’re curious, the final resolution is 96×64.
…and 96×64 easily fits in Arduino RAM (actually 768 bytes of memory).