[kruffin]

Adafruit offers a starter kit with a microcontroller, 64x32 led matrix, and some other doodads for ~$70 (https://www.adafruit.com/product/4812). It's really easy to tinker with. I made a clock that does some crappy visualizations and open sourced it here: https://github.com/kruffin/matrix_portal_gol It actually looks a lot like this Tidbyt (a box with a dot matrix).

The only thing it doesn't have is a RTC, so I just polled a time server every so often.

[awhitty]

Also bought a Matrix Portal and have had a lot of fun with it! Dabbled in writing a raytracer for it, but I don’t know enough about ARM nor C++ to optimize it for decent frame rates. Now the thing runs a newton’s cradle simulator using Box2D, and that’s been a fun desk toy.

[kruffin]

Neat. I'd love to see what that looks like (raytracer or cradle). Found an old Hack a Day from 2014 (https://hackaday.com/2014/11/25/ray-tracing-on-an-arduino/) where someone is raytracing on a 16Mhz micro. Should be faster on the 120Mhz portal, but it took almost 3 days :P