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• Less dots

  Yann Guidon / YGDES • 12/20/2022 at 23:54 • 0 comments

  As I'm trying to source more dots, I realise that maybe my initial system was a bit oversized.

  I'm not sure that many places have enough wall surface for two 130cm-long displays (A1 and A2) or the humongous array I planned in the beginning. Look at this :
  

  This is definitely bulky and, I admit, a bit ugly...
  

  Sso I might has to plan for at least two sizes, and mix&match for each installation.

  As I'm trying to build an enclosure for A1 and A2, I played with a couple of boards and they are already quite large so maybe a 56-px wide display will qualify for a prototype. That's 9 full-length characters, enough to display some bits of information such as a score or player name... And if it's not wide enough, we can still scroll it !
  

• I need more dots

  Yann Guidon / YGDES • 12/14/2022 at 02:00 • 0 comments

  I looked at the stock after some years of it collecting dust and I got these flip dots :

  • 210 rows of 7 dots, 10mm. That makes approx. 35×42px, 1470 total. The surface is barely enough.
  • 2 arrays of 28×16px, with octogonal dots, 15mm. The can only be tiled into a 56×16px array.
  • 3 arrays of 24×16 squares, 10mm pitch. They can be tiled into 24×48px but the surface is still too small.

  And a couple of large arrays in bad shape and hard to drive.

  I have several 28×7 arrays in 15mm but they can't be tiled vertically.

  Sam tried to

  1. unsolder the flip dots, and failed
  2. hack/saw the extra PCB and failed.

  Ideally the dots should be around 1 inch wide, or 25mm. That's 40 dots per mètre.

  In the early days of the project, I tried to make a RGB LED array using strips but

  1. it was still expensive
  2. it draws a LOT of current to make something clearly visible in all conditions
  3. consequently it dissipates a LOT of heat, requiring an aluminium backplate for extra heat conduction, and clearance in the back to let the air flow.
  4. Separator boxes must be built, with a proper optical design that diffuses the LED's spot without losing too much light/contrast
  5. It's still about as fragile as flip dots, without the noises or the null static current, and RGB strips are not ultra-reliable as well.

  I don't have the budget to get modules from AlfaZeta so the last possibility would be to safely recover the 7× strips from Hanover modules, which is going to be a mess... It would require a whole box, or about 14 modules 28×7, to build a 64×42 array, supposing recovery was 95% good.
  

• Games

  Yann Guidon / YGDES • 12/08/2022 at 21:17 • 2 comments

  Question : what simple, casual, easy-to-use games are best for low resolution ?

  Tetris is one of the first suspects of course.

  Snake comes next obviously.

  Pong ? sure.

  Some sort of driving sim, or frogger ?

  space invader ?
  

  If possible, it should be easy to play with 1 or 2 players, so snake could morph into a TRON-like race ?

  Stéphane suggested Shifumi and it would work great : 2 players, extremely simple, and tolerates the latency of the system, which can hold the "votes" secret until both have been cast.
  

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