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Showing posts from October, 2008

Build Status Monitor

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I bought the SparkFun LED matrix to go along with the Arduino and here's what I've built. I basically smiles when the build is green and frowns when it's broken. You can find the code at google code . I wanted to have is scroll messages across and there's code to do that, but in the end it was just too annoying since it sits in front of my desk. I have a routine ready, however if I want to give someone a message. To get the text I used wxPython and I draw the text in a buffer, then I look at the pixels one by one and those become the LEDs to turn on. One nice addition is that I can pass Unicode characters and thus it's relatively easy to show special characters like ⚘♂✔✖✈☝ although 8x8 pixels is often not enough and I have to fix them by hand. Another bonus the that program works from the command line so you can print larger messages: ./text2pixels.py --size 30 --bold --font "Delphine" Arduino ###

Fun with SmartFun's LED Matrix

I had some fun this weekend with the sparkfun LED matrix . It's a little bit expensive at $35.00, but looks like it could have a bunch of cool uses. Programming it I had to learn about SPI and I ended up writing my own SPI routines in processing . I've put the code up at led_matrix_tools and some of it is very reusable. Note: I wrote this on October 12th, I just noticed now that I never sent it.