Thursday, June 12, 2008

Hex codes mapped to cricket LED bus

This project has worked out insanely well. I'll be teaching 9th grade robotics next year using the Super Cricket I mentioned earlier. One peripheral we'll be using is the LED bus, a four-slot red display that can be programmed to display number very easily and letters with much greater effort. In fact, letters can only be programmed by figuring out the corresponding hexadecimal values for each. Fortunately, one Ryan Tucker has done that for us. But I want to go one further and have the kids program abstract patterns for some animated art. So I needed a list of all the hex codes matched to their decimal equivalents and the LED pattern it creates when programmed on the cricket. Wikipedia provided the Javascript that converts decimals into hex values (down the page quite a bit). So I looped it 255 times to give me the list and made an image of each LED pattern in Photoshop by hiding and showing different layers, each with one of the lines. I'm still tweaking the layout to try to get it all on one screen. Here it is.

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