One LED Matrix Table to rule them all
Germany-based Andreas Rottach’s multi-purpose LED table is an impressive build within a gorgeous-looking body. Play games, view (heavily pixelated) images, and become hypnotised by flashy lights, once you’ve built your own using his newly released tutorial.
Much excitement
Andreas uploaded a video of his LED Matrix Table to YouTube back in February, with the promise of publishing a complete write-up within the coming weeks. And so the members of Pi Towers sat, eagerly waiting and watching. Now the write-up has arrived, to our cheers of acclaim for this beautful, shiny, flashy, LED-based wonderment.
Build your own LED table
In his GitHub tutorial, Andreas goes through all the stages of building the table, from the necessary components to coding the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3D printing your own controllers.
Find files for the controllers on Thingiverse
Andreas created the table’s impressive light matrix using a strip of 300 LEDs, chained together and connected to the Raspberry Pi via an LED controller.
The LEDs are set out in zigzags
For the code, he used several open-source tools, such as SDL for image and audio support, and CMake for building the project software.
Anyone planning to recreate Andreas’ table can compile its engine by downloading the project repository from GitHub. Again, find full instructions for this on his GitHub.
Features
The table boasts multiple cool features, including games and visualisation tools. Using the controllers, you can play simplified versions of Flappy Bird and Minesweeper, or go on a nostalgia trip with Tetris, Pong, and Snake.
There’s also a version of Conway’s Game of Life. Andreas explains: “The lifespan of each cell is color-coded. If the game field gets static, the animation is automatically reset to a new random cell population.”
The table can also display downsampled Bitmap images, or show clear static images such as a chess board, atop of which you can place physical game pieces.
Find all the 3D-printable aspects of the LED table on Thingiverse here and here, and the full GitHub tutorial and repository here. If you build your own, or have already dabbled in LED tables and displays, be sure to share your project with us, either in the comments below or via our social media accounts. What other functions would you integrate into this awesome build?
5 comments
LJ
I think it´s brilliant!!!
AndrewS
Almost like a super-sized SenseHAT :-D
Jasse
I absolutely love the idea with games built in! Brilliant!
I was thinking about building a table of my own – plan is to make it a bit higher resolution than this table and also have the table react to received notifications of choice on the phone and also changes in home automation.
Will now definitely have tetris built in! Awesome, great work
Bruce Kessel
This is a cool project that I would love to pursue. However, obtaining the recommended LED controller (TMP2-protocol on USB) has been impossible for me to find.
Has anyone in the US found a substitute for this controller that works?
Andreas Rottach
Hi Bruce,
great to hear that everybody likes this project so much!
Unfortunately, the TMP2 Protocol is a German thing and therefore its hard to get such a controller somewhere else.
But luckily, the engine is quite flexible. If you can find a different controller that is able to receive some kind of data via USB and you don’t mind coding a bit, it isn’t that much work. You basically have to re-implement a single drawing function and everything should work!
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