In this video, I am using a helper class I wrote to display "HELLO WORLD". The driver for the module exposes a single API, DrawBitmap, which takes as an argument a byte array representing the on/off pattern for the LEDs. To make working with the module simpler, I wrote a class with a series of static properties that return the byte array for the uppercase English letters A-Z and numbers 0-9.

To generate the byte arrays required for each letter, I wrote up a quick and dirty HTML and JavaScript utility that displays an 8x8 array of checkboxes, which you can use to create the desired glyph, and which automatically provides the correctly-formatted byte array for use with the LED Matrix module.

With my helper class, I simply create an ArrayList of the letters I want to display, then loop through the ArrayList, displaying each letter in turn. I've named the letters using the NATO phonetic alphabet to make the API intuitive without using single letter property names.

Links:

• GHI's LED Matrix Module
• Alphabet Helper Class code on TinyCLR Codeshare
• Helper Class discussion thread
• HTML/JavaScript 8x8 glyph generator for LED Matrix Module

Full source code is available at http://sdrv.ms/MeeBlipiatorSrc (MS-PL)

Detailed blog post at:

http://devhammer.net/blog/gadgeteer-and-midi-making-music-with-microcontrollers

CORRECTION: In the video, I note that my enclosure is a modified version of the "Gadgeteer Arcade Module". What I meant to say was "Gadgeteer Arcade Cabinet Enclosure". You can find the Ponoko project to make your own Gadgeteer Arcade Cabinet Enclosure here:

http://www.ponoko.com/showroom/NETGadgeteerProjects

The project uses the recently-released Kinect SDK for Windows beta, a custom version of the Session Sorter code from the MADExpo website, hosted in a WebBrowser control within a WPF application (the page uses the isotope.js library for sorting, filtering, and animated transitions, which would be a lot of work to replicate in WPF, so hosting in a WebBrowser control saved time). The WPF application is useful since I can use it to capture audio from Kinect and enable speech recognition, as well as to run the app in kiosk mode. Meanwhile, in the background, I'm running the Coding4Fun Mouse Cursor sample, which captures my gestures and turns them into mouse moves and clicks.

One tricky bit was getting the speech recognition commands passed through to the web page hosted inside the WPF app. Turns out that the WebBrowser control exposes a method called InvokeScript, which you can use to call a named function within the target page. So I coded up a series of javascript functions on the underlying page to do things like scroll up or down, simulate a click on the sort and filter elements (using jQuery's .click() api), etc. While the code isn't pretty, it was easy to do overall, and the result is pretty nifty. Here's the video...