There was a challenge announced called the Black Box challenge where they would give us $5000 and we had to propose something to build. Just for fun we decided to build a huge LED display for graduation. I had been doing a side job soldering circuit boards so I figure how hard can it be to design one. I had a great time and I really learned a lot about coordinating a team of engineers to accomplish something that was really difficult.

To start off we made one with cardboard.. seemed like a good idea even though the final circuit design was pretty different

Next step was to design the circuit board I used pcbExpress for the job.. took several iterations and some great feedback from NASA engineer Aaron Schooley who put up with my email bombardment.

We sent it off to get printed. Initially only 2 boards were printed to see if it would actually work. Anyway of course the first thing I did was to program it to write my name.

Then me and about 5 other students spend the next week soldering over 30k components together.

Here is a video of it working all together

Additionally I developed a user interface that could send images to the board and do the networking appropriately. It also had an interactive mode so you could draw images with your mouse.

The final product was finished on time for the graduation where Michelle Obama was the keynote speaker.