Doing button control of a matrix of LEDs with Pixelblaze only

1

Hi all. For an upcoming project, I’m looking at controlling lights in a 2D LED matrix with several user buttons. Basically Etch a Sketch, with the buttons drawing a line in the matrix in X/Y coordinates. And then saving the resulting LED drawings as patterns or similar, if possible.

I’ve done some quick searching in the forums and haven’t seen this specific thing done yet. Is this something that is basically possible with bare Pixelblaze components like a controller, a sensor board, and some joysticks? And a separate component like an Arduino SD card added to save the files?

Or instead, is this something that I should probably approach with an Arduino setup that integrates Pixel Blaze?

Or something else?

Thanks :slight_smile:

~ a grateful leaning amateur

2

Yeah that’s mostly possible, even without the sensor board. PB has GPIO pads on the underside. In the code, it’s basically the same as Arduino. If you had the sensor board, you could use the accelerometer to have a ‘tilt’ input.

And then saving the resulting LED drawings as patterns or similar, if possible.

That’s the tricky part, I don’t know of any way to save anything to the PB outside of the web UI.

3

Nice project!

The easiest way to retrieve etch a sketch data would be the getVars command form the websockets API:

https://electromage.com/docs/websockets-api

You could do that over WiFi from any computer from Arduino through laptop.