LED belt buckle

Well I was at the flea market today and saw one of these ridiculous gadgets, the ones that scroll text across them. I'm sort of ashamed to admit I was fascinated.

I flipped it over. The board is completely exposed and uninsulated (!). There were several shift registers and a PIC16, I think it was a PIC16F628.

So now I can't help but wonder. Could more interesting code be written? We know how to program these things. The display capabilities are of course limited by resolution and leaving many LEDs on at once will lower the battery life. But I'm wondering- maybe stick figure animation? They could play baseball. Fire rockets at each other. Dunno. What else might it be made to do?

Oh wait- we network a bunch of buckles together!
Make a 360 deg Bayeux Tapestry of pictures.
I am uber geek, bow down before me!

lol
Dont be ashamed i've allways thought they were cool..lol lol ..
How big was it .. length ? width ? height ? number of LEDs , approx..??

Ya know what would be really cool .. tri-color LEDs are pretty common ,
make a sign out of THEM ..
no need to keep bowing , i'm done..

williB said:

lol
Dont be ashamed i've allways thought they were cool..lol lol ..
How big was it .. length ? width ? height ? number of LEDs , approx..??

Click to expand...

**broken link removed**
Not exactly high resolution. It's a bit wide for a belt buckle but not absurdly so. The height is nothing unusual. Looks like 7 high, maybe 24 wide. Comes in a bunch of colors but each piece is made up of all one color.

Now a wide buckle like that couldn't just be flat. Here's the interesting construction- they used a fairly thin PCB and just curved the entire board in the metal frame of the buckle.