Computing stuff tied to the physical world

Another display option

In Hardware on Sep 29, 2009 at 00:01

Here’s another display option, using a 16×32 LED panel by Futurlec:

DSC_0535.jpg

The pattern was hand-coded, to help me figure out which pin is which. The board has 3 16-bit shift registers and corresponding LED drivers. This display can be much brighter than in this picture, I’m using PWM to dim it way down and reduce average current consumption (I think it was 40 mA i.s.o. over 250 mA).

The board is powered from 5V and requires 6 output pins – I’m just using the DIO + AIO pins from three different ports for this test.

Note the 470 µF cap hooked up to the power lines of port 4 to help avoid glitches – switching 32 LEDs on and off at 1 KHz can generate a lot of noise!

Sample code for this display can be found here.

It’d be fun to have this display in a nice enclosure and drive it from packets received over wireless from another JeeNode!

  1. What display is this (where did you get it)? Does it have 2 16×16 matrices? Thanks.

Comments are closed.