Introducing

The board is packaged with all the components to assemble. It has 25 rows and 25 columns, which is 625 LEDs to solder at the end.Each one of the LEDs can be lit individually thanks to a program that can be uploaded onto the board's microcontroller. EMS people had that great idea of re-using Arduino editor so that one can quickly create, build and upload sketches which make the whole process of developping easy and fun.

Pixels frenzy

The library (PeggyLib) which comes with the hardware easily allows to create simple programs for drawing dots on the board's matrix, with different shades of grey.Though, it is not possible to draw lines with it. No problem ! After having built some dots-based sketches, we ported the code of Bresenham algorithm used for fast line rendering. We then quickly built a simple rotating star as an example.From there, we had that idea of drawing a wireframe cube with hidden faces removal. We grabbed some chunks of code used to draw the Javascript cube. To achieve the hidden faces effect with grey shaded lines, we used the trick of multi-framing which consists in drawing several successive frames with different exposure time.

The line drawing routine as well as the cube example will be included in the next release of PeggyLib, which makes us proud.The next step for us is to hack the board so that it can take input in real-time. We already got some nice ideas !...Peggy v2.O was released with an open-source, making it ideal for software or hardware modifications. EMS did a great job on this!

Link
- Peggy on Evil Mad Science Laboratories.
- Additional libs for Peggy.