Last year, one of my colleagues at work was showing off his automatic RC car project. He introduced me to Arduino and pointed me to where to get one. I picked up the SparkFun Arduino Starter Kit with a multimeter. It comes with a bunch of components and tutorials. The tutorials were a great start, but I quickly got bored — for me the best way to learn is to get my hands dirty and deal with problems as they come up. YouTube is full of Arduino projects, and I quickly found something I wanted to build: an 8x8 LED screen that I could potentially expand and make mini games for.

I found a similar project on Instructables which made it easy to figure out what components I needed. I ordered them from Hobby Tronics, Cool Components and Rapid Online.

Here are some work-in-progress shots. It took about 2 months to complete, including delivery wait times and planning.

After all the soldering, most of the work was C++ code, but for me that was the easy bit! You can browse it on GitHub.

And there you have it, a retina display for the Arduino! (viewing distance 100 meters)

Eventually I wanted to expand the screen to a 24x16 matrix (adding 5 more of the same blocks), but realised I’d need a separate power supply. All the power was coming directly from the Arduino, which is just enough to drive 64 LEDs. Adding more would mean reworking the circuit layout or adding a whole new breadboard.

So I decided to park this project and move on to more exciting things.