Recently it came to my attention that DealExtreme is selling some 8×32 LED arrays for cheap here. Since I have a serious weakness for LED arrays I ordered four of them. My ultimate goal is to mount them together to make a 32×32 array, all driven by a single microcontroller. For starters, though, I programmed the onboard ATmega8 MCU on one of them to make some interesting patterns:
The idea came from the multiple-pendulum demonstration that has popped up in a few YouTube videos such as this one. It’s a nice example of complex patterns arising from a relatively simple system, and hence relatively simple software.
That’s really, really cool… Mesmerizing!
It’s a little more hypnotic if it runs more slowly. I sped it up by about 2x for the video, thinking that I might start taxing people’s attention spans.