For Christmas, Michelle bought me one of the things I was hinting for, a diy game system kit that I can program. I figured it would take a long time to build, since I had to solder everything on, so I put it off until I had a nice block of time available last night. The whole process was a lot easier than I thought, and took about three hours.
What is Meggy Jr RGB
First, though, what is Meggy Jr RGB?
Meggy Jr RGB is a handheld platform for developing your own pixel-scale video games.
Featuring a fully addressable 8×8 RGB LED matrix display, big fat comfy button switches, customizable handles, a lo-fi audio transducer, and even 8 extra LEDs for lives, score, ammo, or level, Meggy Jr RGB is a little kit you won’t want to miss. Meggy Jr is fast, programmable, open source and hackable. And fun.
Putting it all together
As mentioned above, this was easier than anticipated. I first read through all the instructions ahead of time to make sure there would be no surprises. Then I followed the instructions closely, step by step, until it was completed, taking photos along the way. Below are a few photos of the process, but you can see the whole set here.
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What’s next?
It’s a great feeling to be able to build a portable gaming platform from the basest of components like this, but there’s another part of this kit that makes it shine. It can be programmed via the Arduino programming language, which I’m told is just Processing. Luckily, I’d already been messing with the language, which is pretty much javascript, so it’s really easy to program in. So… The next thing I’ll be working on with this is making a game to run on it. I don’t yet have the interface cable I need, but should soon, so when I have a game ready, I’ll post again about it.
Another cool thing other people are doing is creating their own “handles” for it. That’s just what the clear plastic pieces are called. I’ve downloaded the templates for that and might make something custom for mine.
Finally, EMS has some other awesome projects, so I may move on to Peggy 2.0 next, as I can think of tons to do with that.
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