Game Console & Message Scrolling Display with 144 LEDs

A PIC16F877A microcontroller is used to design the project and is responsible for driving the display that consists of 144 LEDs arranged in three 18×8 matrices.

The display can be driven by requiring only the PIC16F877A microcontroller. The message content to be displayed was initially stored in an EEPROM chip. The message was then stored in an on-chip EEPROM by doing some improvements. This leads to freeing up the pins previously used for the external EEPROM chip since the device now has only a single chip. Also, a PCB speaker can be added as well as sound support.

The written software for the device include the classic Snake game, a clone of the classic Tetris game, and a text message scroller with various effects such as sine wave. A Talkbot is used by the classic Snake game to reproduce sampled sound while running on the 144 LED display. Adding support for sampled sound playback to microcontroller projects is made easy by the Talkbot which can be controlled over a serial or parallel interface depending on the loaded firmware. To output serial control, one of the input pins is used.

Rest of the project