My latest tinkering: An Arduino throwing data at a couple of shift registers that in turn power an 8×8 RGB LED matrix. I’ve only hooked up half of blue and red right now to get the multiplexing/programming right. Never done this before and it’s rather confusing. Right now it’s working with red, blue and Purple. I’m limited to 6+1 colors, not sure how to get more since I don’t think I can do pulse width modulation through a shift register. It’s fun so far.

Last time [LINK] I talked about cells and DNA and we covered some amazing facts like how many cells there are in the body (100 trillion) and how in each the human genome there are 3 billion instructions or base pairs. Amazing stuff.  This time I want to cover what DNA does. Why it the building block of all life? Again, this info is relatively new to me and some of it is probably wrong.
So DNA is sitting in the nucleus. It’s organized into chromosomes. A chromosome is essentially …

Here’s an Arduino [LINK] connected to a 4×20 HD44780 display, enclosed in 8"x4 1/2" Lexan.
I used a modified version of the LCD arduino library and hacked the LCD Smartie Sketch using Orbital Matrix commands.
LCD Smartie is running the BigNum plugins. It shows Facebook news feeds, BBC Headlines, a Clock, local Weather and my Folding at home status (team 144824) among other things.
This was a fun project, not too much soldering and had a high reward vs time invested.
Here’s a video of the finished product.