Reports from DEFCON continue, including one about this spectacular badge from Queercon. According to Hackaday’s post, Queercon is well known for its artistic badges repping the LGBTQ community at the hacker convention. The obvious fun on this badge is the tiny matrix of LEDs, lending itself to fun text or patterns (want!). Hackaday offers some detail on the build.
Instead of going with WS2812s or APA101s, the Queercon badge team found simple 0604 RGB LEDs priced at about $0.026 a piece. There are 73 LEDs in total, all driven by the same TI LED driver used in previous years, combined with two shift registers and 15 FETs to control the LED commons. Although the LED driver is able to address all 219, and even though the badge is powered by a 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller, this is pretty much the limit of how many LEDs can be controlled with this … // Read more: original article.
