LED Matrix Design
Posted in LED Display on January 17th, 2009 by konkers – Be the first to commentI’ve been working on an RGB LED display for the last month or so. My end goal is to have 16×16 LED modular panels which can be hooked together into a larger display. That way I can grow the display as I have funds. I hope to be able to get 24 bit color out of the display.
The drive circuit for the display is based off the SparkFun’s LED Matrix Serial Interface. I added another 8 row and column drivers. Instead of bit-banging the shift registers I hooked them up to the SPI lines to reduce the load on the microcontroller.
Schematic: ledmatrix16_sch.pdf
I got a panel of the boards fabbed at Gold Phoenix…
… and assembled two
Above you can see some blue wires. One of them was planned because my first test of the board will be for an 8×8 display instead of a 16×16 so I had to route the serial data line around the second set of column drivers. The other three were real mistakes:
- Forgot to hook the test pin of the FT232R (USB serial converter) to ground causing frustratingly intermittent function.
- Forgot to hook up the OE and RESET nets to the microcontroller