5 August 2010

You can never have too many LEDs, we always say.  PicPack user Ben Delarre certainly thinks so to and has a project to prove it.  For this year's Burning Man festival in the middle of the Nevada desert, he is putting together a LED-filled ping pong ball matrix that's 16 by 16 pixels, measuring 1m by 1m.

The LEDs are driven by MAX6964 chips and these are in turn controlled by PIC microcontrollers.  What's remarkable about Ben's project is not that any "pixel" can be set to any RGB colour, but the fact that you can create animations for the "Illuminatrix" via his team's web site.  This can be done frame by frame, or it can even be programmed using javascript, meaning all sorts of creations are possible.  He encourages readers to go and create their own, and these will be displayed at the entrance to the More Carrot Theme Camp for the duration of the festival.

We're looking forward to seeing pictures of the display as it progresses, and we hope to bring you more information about how Ben went about building the hardware and software when all those LEDs have been safely soldered in place. In the mean time their web site is definitely worth a visit to see some of the animations that have been created and get some inspiration for your own microcontroller based project.