grayscale

2 Articles

Game Boy-Style Camera For Playdate

July 20, 2023 by No comments

The Game Boy Camera, while perhaps not the most technologically advanced piece of equipment, left a huge mark on video game and electronics culture. The grayscale photographs are still highly prized, and there are an untold number of projects which interface with original hardware to download authentic Game Boy Camera pictures to modern computers. There are others that look to recreate the feel and style of these images, and the latest comes to us on a Game Boy-like platform as well, the Playdate.

[t0mg] is the creator of this project, utilizing a OV7670 camera module sending data to a Teensy 4.1 which interfaces with the Playdate via USB. The images recorded on the Playdate are 1-bit, slightly different than the 2-bit images the Game Boy Camera was capable of. The case of the camera also physically matches up well with the small console, using magnets to secure it to the device either in normal camera mode, in reverse for selfie mode, and can also support the console in “cover” mode as a way of storing the console to protect the screen. A companion application needs to run on the Playdate to get this all up and running, but with that and a battery plenty of retro-style images are ready to be captured.

All of the source for this project is available on the project’s GitHub page for anyone ready to experience some nostalgia or just experiment with a small camera like this. It’s a clean build that takes advantage of the Playdate’s open-source nature, through which we’ve seen the console turned into a typewriter and inspire other builds like this one-off handheld with a crank-style controller.

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Sailing On A Sea Of Seven-Segment Displays

February 23, 2023 by 39 Comments

The amount of information the humble seven-segment display can convey is surprising. There are the ten numerals, dead-ringers or reasonable approximations for about half the alphabet, and even a few not-quite-canonical symbols. But when you put 12,288 segments to work, you get all that and much more.

Behold Sea of Segments, an art piece by [Will Gallia] that really pushes what’s possible with seven-segment displays. The piece, which looks about the size of a decent flat-panel TV, is composed of an 8×6 array of PCBs, each of which holds an 8×4 array of white LED seven-segment displays; each board also holds two TLC5920 LED drivers. [Will] designed the PCBs to tile horizontally and vertically, making it possible to take data either from the top or right side and output to the bottom or left. Power is distributed to the modules through a series of steel bus bars, which also provide structural support for the display. The whole thing lives in an enclosure with a smoked acrylic front panel, and hangs from a pair of steel cables that also provide power.

Under the hood, a PocketBeagle does all the heavy lifting of talking to the display and translating images onto the display. [Will] came up with an encoding scheme that gives about five bits of grayscale, and built a program to figure out which segments should be lit to create an image. The result is a smooth and convincing reproduction of videos of waves on a beach, which is where the project gets its name. Check out the results in the video below.

[Will] says he drew inspiration for this build from the DigitGrid by [Skot9000]. That was a great project too, but Sea of Segments takes the concept to another level.

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