Controlling an LED Cube
At NIWeek 2012, a project manager at National Instruments gives a quick demonstration of LabVIEW and the NI PXI platform - a rugged PC-based platform for measurement and automation systems. Over 1,700 LEDs wired together can source a single power supply through a large switching matrix to create lighting patterns.
Transcript
00:00:00 hi my name is jay carnek i'm a product manager here at national instruments and we're here at ni week i want to show off a cool demo that we have showcasing labview and our nipxi platform so we have here is over 1700 leds that are wired together and with this we can source a single power supply through a
00:00:17 switch large switching matrix and make connections and patterns on on this big block so you can see right here we've got a basic parachute pattern going and we can do you basically use this since it's software designed or software defined we to create all these different patterns so we we have a couple games that we can
00:00:38 do such as 3d snake so if you're familiar with snake and and typically in two dimensions you've basically got an apple that you chase after and when you hit the wall or double back on yourself you you lose the game this we've added a third dimension we can actually play this with a joystick or or keyboard so i'm
00:00:54 gonna attempt to get a couple apples here you can see the high score is 44. i'm gonna see if i can get a couple before i uh lose here so we're just chasing around this this apple and there we go so uh with this we're just we're making these these new connections and controlling this all through
00:01:16 through labview as well uh and you see that's just like three or four my max is probably seven uh we had an intern score 44 so clearly they've mastered this game but then we can also do some customized things i mentioned this is all controlled through software in this large switching matrix and so we can input a we have an edible
00:01:37 editable text display that we can use and we can spell out different words uh actually it's facing that way but right now we're spelling out in iweek and then showing the ni logo uh along with a custom text interface that we can make this pattern doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it's pretty neat what people
00:01:55 have been able to customize through this so that wraps it up if you'd like to learn more please visit ni.com pxi and check out all the cool things we're doing with pxi and labview you