Giant 30x30 LED board with Conway Life, generative music, pong, and sketch mode

[chessami92]

This project is really cool! Can you tell me how you control so many leds? I'm thinking about making an led array using an arduino, but with 16 i/o pins i can only theoretically control a 16 x 16 board using a series of transistors and "flashing" the lights on and off very quickly to give the illusion of being continuously on. Any help would be great.

[SenorBon]

@chessami92 Google "evil mad scientist peggy 2.0." They have a schematic. Theirs is 25x25 though, so expanding to 30x30 required some tweaking. You use 2 LED drivers controlled via SPI (4 pins total) and 2 multiplexers controlled via binary inputs (8 pins total). The multiplexers drive transistors, and the LED drivers are capable of sinking enough current on their own.

But yes, as you suspected, you still must cycle through rows and columns. Otherwise there would be a LOT more soldering. :)

[whisk0r]

Very cool project guys! The Life + Midi stuff is particularly neat. I posted a video where two Life games pilot a virtual airship. It's great to see someone else using Conway's game to do 'work' too!

[lightharp]

brilliant work! :D

[tr0llslay3r]

this looks awesome ! nice job !

[myrrhlarsen]

dude! so cool.

[vxkvn]

thanhk good

[thrcman]

insane! So getting a Monome

[korgds10]

no idea how it was done, but that's pretty cool.

[tr0nk]

looks cool but can it post to twitter

[daxweb]

great works!!!

what's the cost ?

[karlmonster]

well i think it doesn't cost too much. you need 900 Leds (ebay) and some 450 ping pong balls, a microcontroller and a few hours of work and a goood power supply

[clbgeballe]

@karlmonster 900 ping pong balls...READ the title and description...what u have said makes 0 sense. how's it feel? lol jk but 1 ball per LED

[karlmonster]

@clbgeballe

What do you think about this: 1/2 ping pong ball. This would save you major costs and space. 900/2 = 450

After all I'm sure that's how it's done. trektech.de/LEDBalls/LEDBalls.­htm

look at the pic at the end of the site. There you can see that there are always "half" balls used. So how exactly does it feel having no idea what you're talking about. Please excuse my rather bad English.

[SenorBon]

@karlmonster Define "too much." The ping pong balls were cheap. We got 1,000 for about $150. We would have spent way more on adhesives to attach them if we cut them in half. This way at least the caulk holding them on is mostly obscured by the ball itself.

Trust me, it took more than "a few hours of work." We had to design, prototype, program, debug, and build it.

The whole thing only consumes about 12-15 watts, so the power supply isn't that important.

[r32adt3db]

LED's are so much fun. I love them. It's like having a LiteBright all over again, but for adults.