Might be better IRL, though.
it's indeed better IRL, it was surprisingly hard to film a flickering display with a flickering scrolling text :-)
Nevertheless, it's quite useless of course
Just a little toy to learn a bit more about interfaces and matrix-translations and stuff.
There's someting wandering around my mind of building a 60 cm width by 240 cm high led panel dispay.
We'll see how far i'll get and what resolution can be reached before my mind or budget runs out.
As a small exercise in my progress towards to ultimate tweetshirt, I created an interface for a 8x8 LED matrix display.
It doesn't do much at this moment: a program runs on the PC, fetches your latest tweet and controls the USB attached LEDs to show it as scrolling text.
[flv src="LED_Scrollingtweets.flv" img="LED_Scrollingtweets.jpg"]
The hardware is from Byvac and is cheap and easy, but also a bit limited.
The software is by me and uses their IASI-2 protocol
The scrolling is in fact much smoother then appears in the video.
Maybe I'll rework the hardware interface to control a 4x4x4 LED cube.
I ordered an Arduino today, which will allow much more low level processing and control for these kind of things
a 8x8 RGB display seems a nice project to start with, hoping to scale up to a 16x16 grid if things are going well.