We’re releasing a stalled or abandoned prototype every few days while Seeed Studio is on break. We put a lot of work into these projects, but they’re still missing major components and testing. If an abandoned project sparks your interest, we may have PCBs to get you started.
The goal of this project is to build an ethernet-based 48 channel networked LED controller. It uses a PIC24F64GA002 (probably too small) and an ENC28J60 ethernet chip. It includes an EEPROM with MAC address so multiple units can share the same network.
The LEDs are controlled by a TI TLC5940, a 10bit pulse width modulator LED driver with a ton of features. The interface bus is brought to a header so daughter boards can be stacked on top.
This project currently exists as a completed board only, no software has been developed for it. It turned out to be very expensive to produce, and the market is already saturated with blinky LED gear. Boards are available if you’d like to give it a try.
Schematic and PCB are on the Ethernet LED driver wiki.
I would like to work on this board. What’s needed to get one?
i could port the web platform v1 to it, should be easy enough.
I would like to work on this project – what do I need to do?
Actually, I think you could probably just drop the EEPROM and use a few bytes in the PIC24F’s internal EEPROM…
The PIC24F doesn’t have internal EEPROM. Aside from that, you’d still need a source for MAC addresses, and I’m not sure anywhere is cheaper than the Microchip MAC EEPROM.
The PIC24FxxKAxxx do have EEPROM, but even if other PIC24 do not have it, you can always emulate it by read/writes to program memory. Microchip provides even library which will do everything for you:
http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_PAGE&nodeId=2680&dDocName=en538000