Meggy Jr RGB Portable Game Platform

meggy

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.

Live Full Motion Video On A Peggy

[Windell] was stoked enough to send us [Jay]’s sweet hack on [Windell]’s Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Peggy 2.0 kit. [Jay] added serial input and hacked quartz composer on his mac to light up all 625 LEDs with live motion video. If you were jealous of the Metalab’s giant LED display, now you can have your own – smaller and cheaper.

EMSL has recently supplemented this awesome device with their Arduino Library for Peggy 2.0. It is a program library that contains various animations and demonstrations of how to draw on a Peggy. Download and enjoy them as they are or tweak them to test out some of Peggy 2.0’s capabilities.