The communication flows like the number “2” shape, back and forth from bottom to top, ending with the panel in upper left corner. The chain begins with the Bonnet in the lower right corner. Both the Adafruit and the Zeller boards work well, and I stuck with the pre-assembled Adafruit board for this project.įigure 3 shows how the panels are chained together to make the display. It has three output connectors that drive three display chains at once-in my case, three chains of two panels. Really, it is more like brain surgery, but I built one of the Zeller boards as a personal challenge. You can order them from OSH Park, but you must order the delicate SMT components separately and then do all the soldering yourself. Zeller also designed several flavors of HATs for the Raspberry Pi. The Adafruit tutorial shows you how to download Zeller’s library and his Python bindings. Henner Zeller’s amazing GitHub repo has detailed information on these display panels and a C++ library for the Raspberry Pi. The Adafruit Bonnet has a single output IDC connector to drive one chain of displays-one chain of six in my case. Then it is up to the Pi to bit-bang those GPIO pins. It boosts these signals to 5V, and maps them to the IDC connector for the display panel. The board uses 13 of the Pi’s GPIO pins-six for data and seven for control. I used an Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet to drive the display chain. My Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC was up to the task. With 37,000 individual LEDs (128×96×3) refreshed ten times a second (370,000 updates/sec), the display requires a beefy processor and constant attention. A link to my GitHub repository for this project is available on in the RESOURCES section at the end of the article. And I’ll show you how I revisited the pixels of my youth with a giant 128×96 RGB LED display. I’ll show you how to use my library for color palettes and frame buffers to make your own games. In this article, I will describe how I revived the old Mega-Bug game on a Raspberry Pi, using Python and the Pygame library. The lens magnifies everything, including the score and graphics when the player nears the edge of the maze. The game is a typical maze dot eater, but with a cool visual effect-a magnifying glass that follows the player around the screen. You may have played it as Dung Beetles on the Apple II. Most of my dot-eating was done on the TRS80 Color Computer (CoCo) with the game Mega-Bug. Back then, it was more about clever gameplay than fancy graphics. But I remember when two players took turns guiding a yellow circle to “eat” the dots in a small 2D maze-three lives for a quarter, and we liked it that way. Today, we have massively multiplayer 3D game worlds. Today, pixels and colors are plentiful, and our code deals with shapes and images instead of individual dots.Ĭomputer games have evolved along with the pixel. Today, the resolution of a display screen rivals that of the human eye, and each pixel has more color depth than the eye can distinguish. Each pixel was precious-our code choreographed them one by one. I sound like my grandpa-kids these days have it easy! Back in my day, the computer screen was a few thousand fuzzy squares we could turn on or off, and the rich kids could use four different colors. Pixels were different critters back then. I learned to program in the early 1980s, during the heyday of pixel-programming.
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