I recently released another retrocomputer miniature that incorporates a handful of Adafruit boards so I thought that I'd share the details here.

The original Connection Machines were built in the late 80s and early 90s to provide a few thousand hyper-connected processors which at the time was rather unique. If you're interested, here's a wikipedia page about them.

My Patreon supporters vote for which miniatures I make and I was pretty happy when the Connection Machine was chosen. I was also happy to find that Adafruit sells pretty much exactly what I needed to make the blinking light panels:

• QT Py ESP32-S3 x1
• Red LED matrix x4
• Matrix driver board x4
• Stemma QT cable x4

Assembly requires me to solder the four matrix driver boards to the four LED matrix boards and then plugging in the Stemma QT cables between the QT Py and a chain of the driver boards.

Then I assemble these printed parts. The little C shaped parts on the lower left of this photo are what hold the two-board sandwich of the LED maxtrix board and the driver board.

Then I install CircuitPython on the QT Py and then load it with my code from Codeberg. There you'll find the default blinkenlights script but also a script that uses the network to fetch the time and then turn the Connection Machine into a clock. It took a bit of work to figure it all out so hopefully the code will be a handy starting point for similar projects.

Once everything is assembled I box it up and put it on my gumroad store.

I post pretty much every day about what I'm working on over on Mastodon at @[email protected] and for maker-y types of conversations I like that place much more than the other social media sites. Maybe I'll see you there!