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.
March 1st, 2010 at 06:17
[...] Tobi's Corner » Blog Archive » Arduino IKEA Coffee table hack [...]
March 8th, 2010 at 22:47
[...] 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. [...]
March 9th, 2010 at 00:34
Hi Tobi,
Looks great. Any chance of posting the code so I can have a go with my own displays?
Nick
March 9th, 2010 at 01:08
Just uploaded the code: http://tobiscorner.floery.net/projects/avr/sources-for-the-table/240
March 9th, 2010 at 09:28
WOW is all I can say.
March 9th, 2010 at 15:19
Two arduinos, each handling 1/2 the display, and passing common elements between them? One calculates, takes half, and passes half to #2?
March 9th, 2010 at 15:28
After optimizing the code I managed to read 96×64 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.
March 9th, 2010 at 22:00
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.
March 9th, 2010 at 22:34
[...] 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] [...]
March 10th, 2010 at 09:33
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.
March 11th, 2010 at 04:15
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.
March 18th, 2010 at 22:32
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!!!
March 22nd, 2010 at 09:53
smoked or mirrored glass would have been great but much much more expensive!
April 6th, 2010 at 23:56
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
April 10th, 2010 at 10:35
hi nelson,
i have added a diagram of how I connected those panels.
July 26th, 2010 at 13:03
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