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:
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!