A new open source hardware project every month
You are currently browsing articles tagged LEDs.
John Park at Make has a really nice introduction to 7-segment LED displays and reverse engineering. He maps the relationship between bits in a byte and each LED segment connected to an SAA106 driver. This is a real-world introduction to the tedious art of poking at hardware to reverse engineer a circuit.
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype.
This is a USB controlled RGB color changing light. Someone made some minor modifications to the design and had a bunch of boards produced, we ended up with a pile of the extras. We’re giving away two PCBs this week, just ask for one in the comments.
will_j posted a Bus Pirate script that controls a Sure Electronics 8×32 LED marquee:
Here’s a quick and dirty perl script to display ‘BPv3′ on a Sure Electronics 8×32 LEd Matrix display.
You can also use a 16×24 display if you change the second command code to 44 from 40.
Any improvements gratefully received – i.e. a nice character lookup table process would be good!
View a copy in the Bus Pirate scripts folder. We demonstrated a slightly different Sure LED matrix a in a demo: post a few weeks ago.
Thanks for the tip!
This is an old version, see the latest version on the documentation wiki.
You may have come across this 16×24 LED matrix board on eBay or at Sure Electronics. Each board has three 8×8 LED blocks and a controller to drive them. A simple three-wire serial interface toggles each LED and configures the overall brightness of the board. Up to four boards can be chained through 2×10 pin headers on the back, a connector cable was included with each board.
We used the Bus Pirate to test the board and learn its protocol before using it with the web platform (more on that later). Grab the datasheet and follow along below.
This is the first of a new weekly series that demonstrates devices with the Bus Pirate. Come back next Monday for another all new demo.
Tags: Bus Pirate, LEDs, Sure
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype.
This is a USB controlled RGB color changing light. Ian did this project at DIY Life, a Weblogs, Inc. site that shut down about a year ago. Someone made some minor modifications to the design and had a bunch of boards produced, we ended up with a pile of the extras. This PCB is as-of-yet untested, you can discuss it in the forum.
We’re giving away two PCBs this week, just ask for one in the comments.
Edit: sorry, forgot the title.
Tags: color changer, LEDs, RGB light
Nuxx.net writes:
Today I finally got to poking around with the Hack A Day Bus Pirate v2.go … the LEDs on it are far, far, far brighter than they need to be. At my normally-lit desk in a normally-lit office, they are glaring. I’m going to consider replacing them next time I place an order from Mouser or Digi-Key.
Anyone else have this problem? We’d suggest a larger resistor, 2K+ on R3 and R30, and 600+ on R31 and R32.
