GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Recently, I dug up an old email where I was musing on the big marquee on an old television game show called The Magnificent Marble Machine .  It was a very fancy prop at the time, as most television shows of the era relied on art cards with big, bold letters that would be flipped, slid, or otherwise revealed by stagehands upon the emcee's verbal cue.    k Slide it, Earl! ( Match Game ) - Survey Says?! ( Family Feud ) - Sources: YouTube, Game Show Utopia This is about as fancy as it got for electronic graphics on game show props in the 1970s ( Tic Tac Dough ).  However, they never upgraded this board during the 1980s... Source: Dailymotion And a couple shots of the Magnificent Marble Machine game board in action.  Looks like a plain ol' marquee, but really an astonishing feat of engineering given normally chintzy television props, especially for its era... Source: Gameshows Wikia Cashing In On a Fad Now, the Magnificent Marble Machine w...

Background People interested in the stock market might be inclined to have a cool stock ticker in their room or office.  While it's not quite as useful as a whole bunch of monitors displaying entire panels of quotes and graphs, it does provide at least a mesmerizing distraction, not to mention your room now looks at least a little bit more like a real trading floor in a big office.  This was the original use case for BriteBlox , the modular LED marquee designed by #DoesItPew and myself.  Not only is the marquee itself modular (i.e. you can configure it in various lengths, heights, and shapes), but ideally the control software is modular, leading to a design where any coder can develop plugins to drive the board from any data source they can convert into animated pixels. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten the software quite to the point where it is incredibly easy for third-party developers to write plugins; right now, they would actually have to integrate the feature ...

Well, this is big news!  LEDgoes, my modular scrolling LED matrix system, is finally being put on Kickstarter.   Check out the product here  and learn more!  (The Kickstarter isn't live yet because it's still awaiting approval; I'll post the link here when it's ready.) Why is this cool? Most LED matrices are fixed-width panels; ours is made from smaller panel modules you can push together to make your own desired size, up to 64 panels long. Because you snap the modules together, you can make a bendy LED display. This kit does 3 colors; most DIY kits can only show 1 color. It has an open, simplistic serial interface implemented in firmware, and very versatile software that can drive the firmware to scroll a message from various sources or even show animations.  The software could even help you break the 64-panel limit. The software can control a display consisting of multiple rows of panels in order to display bigger, taller letters.  In this case, ...