Pixels in the air

Some soothing success in serial radio communication. Our nice ready-made radio telemetry dongles work smoothly with the led matrix prototype. Now the display data is coming from the computer wirelessly in 9-byte bursts, the id and 8 bytes of the 8*8 matrix data. We can send quick cycles of unique data to be recognized and displayed by individual modules accordingly. Wireless link is reliable at least through a couple of walls.

Here the patterns are sent from Max/MSP in about one second cycles. The scrolling of the pattern is made in the Stamp. We are currently looking in to a Java "game engine" driving directly the set of modules or tiles as they will be.

Sending patterns manually:
changing matrix

Drawing the image and moving around with the module:
walking with matrix

Entering eighties

I'm approaching the technological knowledge where the rest of the world was 30 years ago. Keeping this pace I'll be able to create answering machine by year 2034. But self-made is always more precious. So I have been lied to.

nuke some popcorn and enjoy following feature films:
clip: chatman
clip: night chevron
clip: T.O.Y. the trilogy

SHIFTOUT Dpin, Clock, MSBFIRST, [d7219]

Finally received my 8*8 matrix chip integrated with the max7219 driver. After desperate bit-register shifting, which still is more black magic than science to me and after poking some pull-down resistors here and there, few boots, some very descriptive swearwords in finnish and I managed to get the space-invader to flicker on the screen before being killed by my most annoying self-shifting bit-register.

Cascadable 8 by 8 Dot Matrix LED