Tobi’s Corner

With three LED Boards from Sureelectronics, a Arduino and my good old ikea couch table I build something new.

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Arduino Interface to Sureelectronic’s 6432 Dot Matrix 5mm Red LED Display Information Board.

Download PDE:

• surematrix.pde

Inspired by http://tinkerlog.com/2009/04/05/driving-an-led-with-or-without-a-resistor/ I started to build a USB driven display. I ordered some big green 5×7 dotmatrix display from http://evilmadscience.com/ and had a look at v-usb.

What you get when combining those is a via USB controllable dotmatrix display. The PC related programming I did in Python using libusb and the python binding called pyusb. So the program should be cross platform compatible! Also python allows one to extend the functionality(e.g. checking for new mail, usb notifications of any type…) very easy.

Video after the break.

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What can you do with 100 common anode rgb leds? Build a 8×8 matrix and interface it!

The circuit uses 74HC595 shift registers with output latch. Each shiftregister interfaces one color + one shiftreg for the matrix rows. The interfaces uses 6 I/O lines for faster speed and easier interfacing. An AVR running at 8MHz can update the matrix with 8 brightness levels displaying nice fading colors patterns or colored text (or both). The sample program creates fading color patterns using a sine table. For smoother display a double buffer was implemented.

Download: rgbmatrix.c

For my 7-segment display AVR clock i was searching for a way to keep the clock accurate. One option would be using a DCF77 standard time receiver. The module I had seemed to be broken so I decided to use an ethernet interface and NTP. For this I purchased a small ENC28J60 + AVR board from Simon Küppers. This small board is only about 38x30mm in size and includes an ATMega168, ENC28J60, Ethernet-Jack + Magnetics and a voltage regulator. The 14 available I/O Pins are connected to a standard 0.1″ header, so there are possibilities to extend the board.

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