PCjs Machines

Lite-Brite

The Lite-Brite concept was invented by Joseph M. Burck at Marvin Glass & Associates and first marketed as a toy in 1967 by Hasbro. See our “50th Anniversary of Lite-Brite” blog post for more on the history of Lite-Brite.

The original Lite-Brite design used a pair of matching black panels punctured with a series of evenly spaced holes arranged in a grid of 39 rows, which alternated between 44 and 45 holes per row, resulting in a hexagonal (“honeycomb”) layout containing 1735 holes. A piece of black paper containing a pre-printed pattern would be sandwiched between the panels, and then your job was to insert any of the (blue, green, violet, red, orange, pink, yellow, or white) colored pegs into the appropriately marked holes.

This simulation takes the “Lite-Brite” concept a bit farther, allowing you to add counters to each of the colored LEDs, making it possible to create a variety of “blinking” and “color-cycling” animations, like this Animated Christmas Tree.

In addition, any of the Original Lite-Brite Images can be turned on underneath the grid, to help you recreate them with LEDs. However, it’s difficult to find decent high-quality images of those original 1967 patterns, and tricky to get them to line up properly, so a little “artistic interpretation” is required.

Eventually, we’d also like to add recreations of the original black-and-white patterns, using the original Lite-Brite color codes (B, G, V, R, O, P, Y, and W).