I have a very soft spot in my heart for pixel art, having grown up in the 1980s with rudimentary 8-bit and 16-bit video games dominating my formative years. So I really love anything that encourages the creation of pixel-based designs. The smART Pixelator does just that – letting you easily turn any image into a real life pixel art creation.
Working in concert with a mobile app, this battery-powered toy takes photos from your smartphone, and converts them into color images on its built in RGB LED matrix. This serves as a template onto which you can place colored pegs, sequins, or beads. Once your design is complete, you can remove the tray and frame your artwork. It’s basically like a modern day Lite Brite, except you can actually keep your completed designs.
If you use pixel beads, you can extract your images from the Pixelator and gently iron them through a special sheet to melt them into a permanent pixel art creation. As is shown in the video below, you can even create larger images which take up more than one screen on the device.
The smART Pixelator is available now over on Amazon. Prices start around $40, and they also sell add-on bead, peg, and sequin sets for about $15 to $20 each. I would have so loved to have one of these when I was a kid.
