A Baby Busy Board on an LED panel #Arduino #LEDmatrices

The What I Made Today blog posts about their Baby Busy Board 2.0 – Icons, using PROGMEM and utilizing One LED panel.

Last year we celebrated my daughter’s first birthday, and as a present I’ve built her a busy-board and described all the build up on this post. During the build-up I left a lot of upgradeable parts such as knobs, switches, screens which weren’t operated at the time. On this post I’ll describe the upgrade I made for my daughter’s second birthday.

I ended up doing less upgrades then I planned to since I encountered some software issues that took me some time to understand and solve, so I decided to focus on a modest but very nice upgrade. As always, here is a description and some videos of the new features:

  • 32×64 RGB panel, powered by an Arduino Mega.
  • There are 4 knobs, 2 for each 32X32 pixels which controls the images (or icons).
  • First knob changes the icons “family” type (animals, shapes, clothes, numbers etc.).
  • Second knob switches between icons in a chosen family.
  • When the first knob reaches to its maximum value, all icons disappear and you get a blank drawing board, and by using the other knobs you can control the pixel’s horizontal and vertical location and can draw freely.
  • Three more knobs and switches are located on the bottom of the panel. They control the red, green and blue colors in some of the images and can change those images’ color when played with.
  • Main switch to power on/off the board.

Programming the matrix was done using the Arduino Adafruit matrix panel library using the library manager.

Ed: Maybe for version 3.0 I can suggest the Adafruit Grand Central board? Lots of memory, plenty fast!

See the blog post for gobs of details. And a couple of the many videos are below.


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