Building a First Prototype of a Multi-scale Modular Distributed Display

Blinky Blocks are cubic modular robots, which communicate with their neighbors through their faces, and change color using LEDs. We previously used sets of Blinky Blocks to display images on the basis of one Blinky Block being one pixel. In this paper, we build a multi-resolution screen with modular robots. This screen benefits from its distributed architecture: being able to work if some nodes fail, and being completely customizable. We propose a hardware architecture and related protocols to attach a 8 × 8 LED matrix to a Blinky Block. The architecture allows us to build distributed multi-resolution screens by mixing regular and enhanced Blinky Blocks. We demonstrate the usage of our integrated screen through experiments with continuously fed Blinky Blocks as well as an autonomous scrolling.