Nick Brown's Punnish Light Rail Is a Train-Themed Game Badge Built Using 144 LEDs
With tracks of yellow LEDs and platforms of blue, the player has to guide the light-based trains around the badge to collect cargo.
Maker Nick Brown has designed and built a badge that hosts an interactive game, in which the player guides cargo trains along LED tracks: Light Rail.
"This project started from the simple desire for me to come up with my own concept for a hardware badge," Brown explains. " To me, the hardware badge is the perfect manifestation of the maker/hacker culture. They embody the curiosity to experiment and try new things, the desire to always be learning and improving, and most importantly the willingness and desire to share your project with the community so others can be inspired, learn from, and subsequently build upon your work. This last facet is the most important to me because it's the primary cog that drives the maker community. It is from this sense of sharing with community that really drove me really stop 'lurking' and start putting my own projects out for others to see."
Initially, Brown was stuck for an idea for what the badge should do and what hardware it would need — then the idea for Light Rail struck suddenly one night. The gadget's naming pun gives away its design: it acts as a simple light rail simulator, but one in which the trains are represented as literal light shining up from LED tracks. Beside the tracks are more LEDs, representing cargo ready for collection, while the board's design also turns other components into buildings and adds roads and parking spaces on the silkscreen layer.
"As soon as the Light Rail idea hit me, I started right away," Brown recalls. "I had been trying to fall asleep, but the moment the idea surfaced, I got up immediately and started chugging away at the initial schematic in KiCad. By the time I went back to bed, I had already finished the majority of what would become the final schematic!"
That schematic builds around a Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller, linked to a Lumissil IS31FL3731 LED driver for 144 track and platform LEDs. There's a three-digit seven-segment LED display for scoring, too, with its own driver. "Layout was definitely where I spent the bulk of my time," Brown says. "I started by roughly laying out the LEDs to form the outer loop of the track. Then, I drew the board's outline/edge cuts. KiCad's raytracer was super helpful here to give me a good visual sense of the LED spacing and adjust the overall proportion/margins."
Brown has released design files and firmware source code for the project on GitHub under an unspecified license.