Ikea Frekvens LED matrix modding
I found a couple of ikea frekvens LED matrix cubes from that teenage engineering collab in a thrift store in Vienna. They were cheap and I’d heard about people modding them. Plugged in, they provide possibly the most dissapointing lightshow I’ve seen:
Whatever electronics they’ve got in there, it’s doing a very simple job: Show a static frame of a pre-baked five frame looping animation. Monitor a microphone and progress the animation each time a loud sound occurs. Check two buttons on the back to turn the LEDs on or off, and switch between a few different animation sets.
That’s it. Nothing dynamic, nothing exciting. Why not make it just a bit more exciting?
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A few existing projects:
- funkyhome.de replace the inner controller board with an ESP-8266 to build modular desktop clocks.
- SpritesMods install an ESP-CAM module by drilling through the LED matrix board to do tracking-based animations, building an IRL xeyes.
- @frumperino on github began building a library for the cubes some years ago using the adafruit gfx library.
I think my general goals for modding are something like:
- Maintain feature parity with the original cubes. As in, I don’t want to loose or add new aspects to the cubes. So no camera or wifi, but keep the microphone and buttons in use.
- Be non-hacky and robust. I want to produce a result that can survive a drop or change in environment the same as the original cubes. So no levering solder joints or flying jumper cables, no need for setup.
- Be economic. As in, be plausibly mass-producible in theory. Even if I’ll probably never come across any more of these things. (My suspicion is that they didn’t sell that well… I wonder why)
So basically, I think I’m trying to prove what kind of product the cubes could be if the TE software engineers had done a proper job…
