Arduino IKEA Coffee table hack
With three LED Boards from Sureelectronics, a Arduino and my good old ikea couch table I build something new.
The displays are connected to the Arduino to share the row select pins (A,B,C and D) and the control lines EN, CLK & LATCH. The serial lines R1,R2,G1,G2 have their dedicated pins. So there are 19 pins needed out of possible 20 (not counting the reset pins as I/O). As the displays are loaded in 16 rows a 64bit some transformation has to be done while loading the display. This limits the update rate hard. A possible way to improve the frame rate is moving the transformation to the function setting the pixels.
Or maybe changing the connection scheme to common R1,R2,G1,G2 with separate EN & LATCH for each display which would result in 15 I/O pins needed but maybe suffer from slower update rate. As the display modules are chainable it is possible to connect them in series and load the 16 rows with 192bits each and using only 11 pins, but reducing the frame rate again. Since the ATMega328 cannot achieve high enough frame rates at any connection scheme I would suggest using the chained way.
26.02.2010. 17:26
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[...] Tobi's Corner » Blog Archive » Arduino IKEA Coffee table hack [...]
[...] a lot of LEDs, and a little bit of glass cleaner. [Tobias] spiced up his IKEA coffee table by adding 6144 LEDs. This is a larger realization of SparkFun’s LED coffee table which used 64 8×8 modules. [...]
Hi Tobi, Looks great. Any chance of posting the code so I can have a go with my own displays? Nick
Just uploaded the code: http://tobiscorner.floery.net/projects/avr/sources-for-the-table/240
WOW is all I can say.
Two arduinos, each handling 1/2 the display, and passing common elements between them? One calculates, takes half, and passes half to #2?
After optimizing the code I managed to read 96x64 pixel images from FLASH and displaying them with about 350 frames / second (when doing nothing else). So I will go for a bigger AVR (thinking about Mega644p ones) to have some free I/O's to connect some NES controllers and some kind of memory and maybe bluetooth.
Nice. Is it visible in a fully lit room? I have one of the Sure panels but am disappointed by its (lack of) brightness. Yours looks brighter somehow.
[...] a lot of LEDs, and a little bit of glass cleaner. [Tobias] spiced up his IKEA coffee table by adding 6144 LEDs. This is a larger realization of SparkFun’s LED coffee table which used 64 8×8 modules. [Tobias] [...]
Hi, yes the panels are very bright. It is possible to read them under normal daylight conditions. Sure it gets harder when the sun direct hits the display.
I wonder why yours are so much brighter than mine. I see in another thread (animations) you're updating at 50Hz. My panel has to be refreshed at 70Hz (IIRC) with not much margin for error. I wonder if that's part of the reason for the brightness difference.
you should put a mirrored or smoked glass so all the electronics are hidden but the light would still be seen and would look awsome!!!
smoked or mirrored glass would have been great but much much more expensive!
Hi, there is an awesome work. sorry my english. can you post or send the diagram of connections? i need to construct a similar table but i don't know where begin. Thanks and regards from argentina
hi nelson, i have added a diagram of how I connected those panels.
[...] matrix Arduino IKEA Coffee table hack - [Link] Tags: Arduino, Led, matrix Filed in Arduino, Led | 1 views No Comments [...]
Hi, awesome project, can you give me some link to where you bought these three bi-color panels ? I searched sureelectronics.net but I couldn't find them. Regards, Aleks
how did you make that
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