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Today, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories announced a new kit, the Meggy Jr RGB. Meggy is a development platform for handheld pixel games built around a 8x8 RGB LED matrix display and driven by an ATmega168 MCU. You can write your own games for it and use it through the Arduino dev environment. Nifty!
A unique feature of Meggy Jr RGB is that it is designed to be mounted inside a "handle set" -- a wooden or plastic case that's safer and more pleasant to hold than a bare circuit board. You can make, mod and customize your own handle sets to suit your taste-- These are like faceplates in that you can switch whenever you want to suit your mood or the game that you're playing, however different handle sets can radically change what the Meggy Jr looks and feels like. Above, you can see what our basic handles (top) look like, as compared to a set of custom smoke-colored batwing handles (middle).
You can design your own custom handles, starting from our templates-- either to make them on your own or to have them fabbed by laser shops like Ponoko or Pololu. (Ponoko in particular offers some very interesting materials to make cases out of, like felt and bamboo!)You can download the two handle designs shown above as PDF and Inkscape SVG files (780 kB .ZIP file). Each handle design consists of a sandwich of two pieces of material that go above and below the circuit board. For a perfect fit, fab the front piece (the carapace) from 0.24" thick material (or slightly thinner), and the back piece (the plastron) from 0.12" (or so) thick material.
Meggy Jr RGB
Meggy page at the Evil Mad Science Shop
