September 15, 2008
Play four way pong on the coolest coffee table ever
by Dhiram Shah
Your normal coffee table holds magazine and coasters. But SparkFun’s LED coffee table which took 2 years to built offers a glimpse into the future. For starters you can play four way co-operative pong in it. This one of a kind piece is not available anywhere.
“The table itself was bought secondhand and refinished. Then it was retrofitted with proper mounting for the big LED matrix. The individual LED matrices were mounted on a custom plastic frame. All this work was done by resident mechanical engineer and lady-killer Casey Haskell. The matrices are connected 8 to a row, all 8 rows controlled via a custom router board connected to an Olimex LPC2106 development board. The entire rig is powered by a hacked 500 watt CPU power supply.
* 65 total microcontrollers
* 4092 RGB 256 color LED’s on 64 Matrices
* 7-9 Amps power draw
* 130,944 bits updated per second
* 1 LPC2106 Master Controller
* 1 Custom router board
* 8 Custom power boards”
(Video after the jump)