This is quick little project I put together before LA Decom. I actually assembled the kit a few years ago when I got it from Jimmie Rodgers. This is one of the earliest iterations of the kit so the traces are smaller than they need to be and the location of the interface pins is not ideal. In February, I added the heart to my headphone hoodie by sewing it with conductive thread to a Lilypad Arduino. Unfortunately I couldn’t get enough current that way so the project sat till now.

The heart uses a technique called Charlieplexing to drive the 27 LEDs using just 6 pins. To finally get the device working, I just soldered wires directly to the heart. My favorite feature of this project was the simple Flash based animation tool Jimmie included to generate the Arduino sketch. It really made what could have been an arduous process of generating animation frame arrays very very easy. You can see the final few animations I programmed embedded below. I liked this badge idea so much, I ordered 2 of Alex’ 64 pixel kits.