This project is a terrific example of what can be accomplished with a rather complicated logic circuit. It’s an Etch-a-Sketch made from a 16×16 LED grid. That in itself is only somewhat interesting. but when hearing about the features and that it is driven by logic chips we were unable to dream up how it was designed. There’s no schematic but the video commentary describes all.

The thing that confused us the most is that the cursor is shining brighter than the rest of the pixels. This is made with two different 555 times and a task cycle trick. When you turn the trimpots the cursor position is tracked by some decade counters. Pixels in your path are written to a RAM chip which acts as the frame buffer. and there’s even a level conversion hack that let’s the display run at 15v to achieve the desired brightness. top notch!

[via Reddit]