Driving 4 8×8 LED matrices via the HT1632C and an Arduino
Luca wrote a tutorial on how to drive four 8×8 LED matrices connected to the HT1632C IC via the Arduino. The HT1632C is a LED driver IC capable of controlling 256 LEDs. It uses a custom 3pin serial interface. The Arduino sketch for the demonstration displayed in the video is available.
This entry was posted in Arduino, LEDs, tutorials and tagged 8x8 LED matrix, Arduino, HT1632C, tutorila.
Comments
this is an similar one, cheaper: http://dx.com/p/jy-mcu-3208-lattice-clock-ht1632c-driver-with-mcu-support-secondary-development-104306?item=1
uses the same chip, but includes an atmega8, there are lot of info about that one on the internet, it have solderpads for ds18b20, rtc, batteryholder, and various components, so one can enable ut as an watch and so on.
I’m preparing my own infoboard similar to this and I want it to be controlled directly from Raspberry Pi. I have 4 boards from Sure, they are 32×16 bicolor 5 mm ones, 4 HT1632C per board. But they are connected quite badly, the colors have different brightness and each controller controls both colors on 2 8×8 matrices instead of having each just for one color. It would be probably easiest to just change the onboard limiting resistors and match the brightness somehow.
Then the serial controls is a bit reatarded too (literally). They use 16 pin connector but only 4 pins are used for data control. You have to drive chip select of each HT1632C by shift register so it slows you a lot for each command and you can’t use any standard SPI interface. And I have 4 boards/16 chips to control :) I could probably mod them as well and wire out standard HW SPI interface and some 1 of 16 CS decoder. That would take 3 SPI pins + 4 encoded CS pins, sounds like it’s worth it.