Animated Pixel Art with ESP8266

If you like pixel art, having an animated toe-tapping Sonic sprite on a 64x32 LED matrix would be a really excellent display. Creator Ryan…

Jeremy Cook
5 years agoGaming / Displays

If you like pixel art, having an animated toe-tapping Sonic sprite on a 64x32 LED matrix would be a really excellent display. Ryan Bates created just such a device as shown in the video below, following the reasoning “why buy it, when you can build it for three times the cost?” While that might not make sense to the general public, Hackster reader-hackers will undoubtedly understand the impulse, and as revealed toward the end of the clip, he does actually have a more conventional reasoning behind it.

His project uses a Wemos D1 mini board for control, interfacing it with a 64x32 LED RGB panel via Brian Lough’s D1 mini matrix shield (also featured here in this Tetris clock) for easy attachment. He then modified Lough’s “LED-Matrix-Banana-Dance-Display” to instead show a tapping sonic. Although straightforward in that he “just” had to plug in the new values for each frame, this meant 2,048 hex values for each animation frame, limiting the display to 8–9 frames in total before he ran out of flash.

Sprites were found here, and conversion can be done via this website, meaning that you too can make your own animations with a relatively straightforward procedure. If you’re still wondering why Bates would pursue this project, he’s been considering using it with custom arcade mini-cabinets for dynamic graphics.

Jeremy Cook
Engineer, maker of random contraptions, love learning about tech. Write for various publications, including Hackster!
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