Tobi’s Corner

Playing Snake with NES Controller on the display!

Displaying a 64x64 pixel animation exported from a GIF Animation with a custom python script.

UPDATE: After some optimization in the animation loading, the set pixel functions and the display refresh function the Arduino is able to display about 50 frames per second when displaying a 96x64 monocolor animation from flash memory.

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

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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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I’ve bought some 14cm high red 7-segment LED Displays on EBay and started to build a clock based on AVR ATTiny2313.

The circuit is build with an AVR ATTiny2313 a UDN2982 high side and a ULN2803 low side driver/switch

The LED Module is powered with 18-20V to give a brighter display. The forward volatge of a single segment is about 13V. 13V + voltage loss at the switches (worst case 2V + 1.6V) is about 16.6V. I used 39Ohm resistors for the segments and so 16.6V + 39Ohm x 0.08A = 19.72V. Because of multiplexing 4 modules to get an avarage current of 20mA per segment the current has to be four times higher ( 20mA x 4 = 80mA ). The dots on the modules have a lower forward voltage resulting in a higher limiting resistor: (16.6V – 3.6V – 3.6V) / 80mA = 120Ohms.