The Hackspace’s Many Moons
Not so long ago, walking through the hackspace at night was a dark and scary experience. Today, you’ll be guided by the hackspace equivalent of moonlight. You probably don’t know what I’m talking about… I am of course referring to the warm amber glow of an LED matrix display. Such displays have made many happy hackers all over the world. Early LED matrix displays were simple, typically built upon a string of shift registers – simple logic chips which take serial data and convert it to parallel outputs. Each output can be connected to one column of LEDs, and each row connected to some kind of current sink (or source, in some cases), such as an array of transistors. Due to their simple design, hacking them to do whatever you want is a fun and achievable project. Like many hackspaces, Nottingham Hackspace has a long history of LED matrix displays. Our first dates back to 2011, hacked by Matt and set up ready for our first ever Open Day in May . This display still runs today in our Comfy Area, showing emails to our, as well as messages posted from IRC and Discord using the di