[Projekt:Bunt]

While relaxing on a beach in spain back in 2006, an idea came into my mind. i wanted to build an LED display. fullcolor and large. no large resolution, just large in terms of dimension. in december 2006, i made actual plans for the project. from there on, i experimented, prototyped, programmed and soldered from time to time. having no deadline made it a real long time project. but then in 2009, i had my 10×10 pixel RGB LED matrix, a square meter of color and light.

i guess most of you are particularly interested in some facts about the hardware and software. first the hardware. i used 100 Superflux RGB LEDs with an angle of radiation of about 100°. the LEDs are dimmed via 8-bit PWM, generated by ATmega8 microcontrollers. each controller is responsible for 4 LEDs, which makes it a total of 25 controllers, running at 14,7456 MHz. there are 4 controllers on each PCB, the outputs are amplified by darlington arrays.

every LED has it’s own small board, including resistors for each color channel. the pixels are separated by a grid made of 4mm plywood. the light in each pixel is diffused by a small piece of air filter material and the frosted plexiglas pane. diffusion was a major problem, and i guess it’s not really possible to achieve perfect diffusion. my solution is a tradeoff between good diffusion and complexity.

the data comes from a PC via RS232(USB adapter) at 460800 baud. all controllers read the RS232 line simultaneously and are addressed by a reserved byte in the data stream. so i broadcast the data to all controllers and each one picks the data it is supposed to read. i’ve reached frame rates beyond 100 FPS.

the final software was written in JAVA because of the OS independency. it is still in development and will probably always be. at the moment it is capable of playing back animations which are stored in bitmaps, displaying the game of life and some variations of it, simple particles and several colorful effects and filters. and of course multiplayer tetris with overlaying playfields. can drive up to three sane persons really nuts.
the matrix was always supposed to be some entertaining decoration element, so it has to be able to generate an endless variety of content without steady user inputs. so i let the software surf the internet and jump from link to link. on every website, it collects content. at the moment, its just an image of the whole website, but i plan to analyze for example the text on the website. the image of the website is analyzed to get it’s n main colors, which are then the basic colors of graphical effects. i hope to end up with some kind of AI which analyzes the web in-depth and shows a simulated creative behavior in dealing with forms, colors and movement. but that’s an utopia right now and it’s gonna be a long way.
another plan was to add some kind of interactivity, but the design is not optimized for adding sensors. maybe a webcam could be used as a proper input-device.
future plans for the hardware include the integration of a netbook to have a completely standalone device which connects to the internet via wifi or ethernet. i considered some embedded solutions, but as old netbooks get cheaper and cheaper, this would be a reasonable solution

if you want to have detailed information about the development and the building process of this project, please visit the project’s own blog
http://rgb-led-matrix.blog.de (german)