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Our pals over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have released version 2.0 of their awesome Peggy LED pegboard display kit. I had the pleasure of seeing this thing in action at last week's Maker Faire. I want.
...Peggy 2.0 still does the same darn thing: it provides efficient power to a 25 x 25 array of LED locations. Peggy is designed to takes some of the sting, complexity, and mess out of playing with LEDs. It's a versatile and powerful light-emitting pegboard that lets you efficiently drive hundreds of LEDs in whatever configuration you like, without so much as calculating a single load resistor. You can install anywhere from one to 625 LEDs, and Peggy will light them up for you ... The biggest change is that the Peggy 2.0 hardware now supports simple animation capability with individually addressable LED locations. Besides the microcontroller, there are now four support chips that help to drive the rows and columns of the display. Now, we're not talking live video feeds or long movies here (speed and memory considerations will spoil that party), but you might be surprised how much you can do with a little AVR microcontroller.
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This looks really nice. It's everything to board should have had.
At the price, they should dominate retail signage.
Now to hold my breath for the RGB LEDs in version 3 ;)
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Rats! I still haven't finished version 1. My kids insisted I socket all the LEDs, and I'm only 2/3 finished (I got a good deal on machined sockets, and am removing all the pins from the sockets and soldering them in. I solder them in from the top side -- luckily the board has solder pads on both sides!)
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Your way sounds pretty nice as a lite-brite toy for the kids.
How are you handling the LEDs? Just trimming the leads to a more managable length? What about the polarity of them?
Just consider this some encouragement to get it done.
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Yup, the Lite Bite was our inspiration. No AC involved. The batteries seem to last forever!
We just trimmed the LED leads to about 1/4".
We simply touch the LED leads to the live sockets to determine polarity before inserting them. So far, this hasn't seemed to hurt LEDs or the circuit.
When I'm done I'll add a wooden base to the battery end of the PC board, so that it can stand up vertically. It is just the right height to shine out our front window.
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