Yesterday, we featured [Andrew]’s orientation aware camera. We want to highlight another one of his projects: LED Life. It’s a 6×5 LED matrix playing Conway’s game of Life. He used the low power MSP430 like our e-paper clock. the best part of the writeup is his explanation of how Charlieplexing works. Microcontroller GPIO pins generally have three possible states: output high, output low, and input. This combined with the directional nature LEDs and some creative wiring means you can run a large matrix of individually addressable LEDs with just a few IO pins. instead of just flipping the IO pins on and off you change their assigned state. have a look at [Andrew]’s site for some great illustrations of how the system works. A video of his LED Life board is embedded below.