Our first prototype was a relative success, but the size of the PCB was too big, and we want to eventually put more LEDs in the display.

For the second iteration we use twelve 74HC595 shift registers to drive the thirty-two RGB LEDs. The PCB arrived from China after a week. There was a minor error in the design, easily fixed by soldering two jumps.

On the left side, we can see the teensy, HC-05 bluetooth modue, and AC/DC converter for the power.

We also started to work on the bluetooth streaming. The idea is to use the display like a screen. It makes for an interesting challenge since the data need to be compressed enough for bluetooth low speed, and yet still need to be easily uncompressed on the teensy.

An other issue we faced was that propagation speed of the data along the shift registers limits the number of time we can blink the LEDs. After some time tweaking the software, we got it working properly.

And here we go for our glorious first video game test: