shackspace hacker @4RM4 was looking for something to hack when he visited 29c3. He found someone who was selling RGB-LED stripes with individually addressable LEDs which was (understandably) irresistible and he already had a RaspberryPi to control it with. Controlling the stripe is done via one of the Pi’s SPI ports. However there was nothing to mount the stripe to… except for a trash bin. Luckily the trash bin had a circumference of exactly 1 meter resulting in a 10 row high tubular display when he wrapped the 10 meters of LED stripe around it.

One of the first hacks was a text scroller which was nice but not quite there yet. But soon after that was done 4RM4 was off to the land of classic games and quickly hacked together a snake) clone. Playing snake on a tubular display was quite a challenge and since the trash bin had to stay at the congress center once 29c3 was over he opted to go for a more familiar and usable form factor by cutting the 10 meter LED stripe into smaller pieces to build a rectangular display.

He improved his snake clone by adding a high-score feature, auto-play bot, support for free dot placement for debugging, and a clock display in idle mode.

Playing it got even more fun with a Wii-Nunchuck hooked up to the RasPi which was quite easy since he could use the Pi’s GPIO port to talk to the Nunchuck’s I2C interface.

Of course the full code is available on GitHub and there’s some documentation (in German) on the shackspace wiki.