I owe thanks to Rupert Rawnsley for the guest post he did on a way of controlling the Spidey Wall which has given me the impetus to get the job “finished”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9NalPaHysA
There are 1686 LEDs in the wall and each is individually addressable. After trying many schemes for controlling the LEDs I ended up with an MBED LPC1768 which runs a very lightweight web server. The server implements a REST API with a small number of methods, and only the following 3 are used to make this demo:
- Clear
- POST RGB values for every LED (a POST payload of around 5Kbytes)
- Show
This allows a very simple web application to drive the Spidey Wall (cross-domain access is overcome by sending the access-control-allow-origin headers from the web server). So a small amount of javascript can be used to create stunning visuals.
In this video the Spidey Wall appears in landscape orientation although it is really rotated 90 degrees to this – i.e. it is taller than it is wide.
Thanks again to Rupert for providing the inspiration needed to get to this stage.