After my recent adventures with the GirlTech IM-Me, one of their other toys caught my attention - the GirlTech Sugar Cubes.
The Sugar Cube is a cheap 16×16 monochrome LCD in a tiny plastic box. It’s sold as electronic jewellery and comes with some cheap plastic beads and a bit of string. Each cube has a character on, which responds to button presses and movement. Several different characters are available and (as a parent) you’re meant to buy them all.
As you’d expect, it’s a single unknown chip potted in black gunk. Probably, because of the drive for low cost, the character is set with 4 solder bridges on the PCB.
Bridging just the bottom jumper gets you the ninja character… any invalid set of bridges gets you a flashing .
OMG it’s a blink tag…thanks for the trip down memory lane
Have you seen the new Yahtzee game? It uses interactive LCD tiles to spell words. I’d love to see someone tear those open.
Oops… I meant Scrabble… Scrabble Flash specifically.
@Ken Interesting, I’d like to know how they work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lCC9mLKPdY
Perhaps they licensed the MIT Siftables…
@Ken I bought some of these the other day £15 for a set of 5. They use IR to communicate - each one has 2 sets of tx+rx in a slit on the sides. There are two epoxied blobs. Not sure what’s under them, though I think every unit must contain the full dictionary.