Built Game Frame from scratch

[gliebetronics]

Hey there! Thanks to some tips from Jeremy and other folks posts I read around the forums, I was able to finish my custom Game Frame build. I laser cut nearly everything but also got some CNC milling in there too. I put a time-lapse montage video of my build process on YouTube here if anyone is interested to see it come to life.

Dan’s custom Game Frame build

Next step is to finish picking over all the art people have shared and also try my hand at creating some art of my own.

[Jeremy Williams]

This is great! A few questions… was the need to break the strips into blocks of 4 due to a bad measurement, or really even necessary given the distance from the screen? Seems like a lot of extra work. How do you like milling your own PCBs? Easy to adjust to the limitations? Looks like you used Photon?… Did you get the IR receiver working too?

[gliebetronics]

Thank you! I had begun designing all the pats anticipating that my LED’s were exactly 17mm between the center of each LED. Once the LED’s arrived from good old Ray Woo on AliExpress, I realized they were not quite that precise on the spacing. If had centered each strip, the LED’s on the ends would have been about 5mm off center. By cutting them every 4 LED’s and centering each 4-LED section it kept things mostly centered. It was a bit of extra work but since you might notice in the video that I built the entire matrix backwards. Oops. I just didn’t film myself ripping it all apart and reassembling it in reverse to correct it. I know I probably can flip it in software but I wanted to retain the ability to run your stock firmware unmodified.

I’ve milled several PCB’s on my Shapeoko2 successfully. It is completely doable with that CNC as long as you autolevel it properly which I did show in the video. I use Chilipeppr to run the CNC which has a really nice built in CNC PCB autolevel feature and Eagle Board import, and it free. 😛 It also really helps to have the proper endmills for PCB milling. I do love that CNC though, really fun to build and work with. I used it to make the parts for the Laser cutter in fact.

Yup, I used a Photon. Really neat chip I must say. The cloud pushing is nice. No wires.

I got the IR working. It’s not really shown in the video but after the fact I added the IR hidden into the black border. My scrap remotes don’t seem to work at far range but it could be my remotes suck or maybe I chose a less than ideal IR sensor. Not sure yet.

By the way, is there any plans to have support for something like playlists or profiles so you can have a set of animations for a party vs. animations for casual viewing, etc
Thanks!

[Jeremy Williams]

Profiles is an interesting idea. I’ll give it some thought.

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