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Demo: Sure-electronics DE-DP014

July 12, 2010 in Bus Pirate, demonstrations, documentation by Sjaak | 1 comment

To demonstrate some of the new commands from the new firmware 5.2, we interfaced the DE-DP014 from Sure-electronics. This is a single, SPI-like controllable 1.8″ single 5×7 dotmatrix. It has an on-board PIC controller which stores a special ASCII font. The package consist of two units, a simple demo board and two 10-pin cables. Sure provides a decent manual, which is only downloadable from their store.

The DE-DP014 has two 10-pin shrouded headers to provide power, brightness control, data-in, data-out, and clock. The top header is the input and the bottom one the output. Up to 20 units can be daisy chained (according to the manual, we don’t earn enough to buy such an amount!).

Get a Bus Pirate for $30, including worldwide shipping at Seeed Studio. Adafruit also has the Bus Pirate and probe cables in stock and ready to ship.

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SURE programming adapter update

July 10, 2010 in programmers, unboxing by Ian | 3 comments

Here’s a follow up on the PIC programming adapter from SURE we posted a few weeks ago. mizch mentioned that SURE’s shipping can add 30-40% to the final price, and suggested browsing eBay to see real prices. We found it on eBay for $9.99 with free shipping, and ordered it on June 28. The board shipped June 30, and arrived July 8 in a familiar Seeed-style box.

The board is good quality. It has acrylic plates on the top and bottom, the circuit board is in the middle. We’d use this style of case on a future project.

The top layer of acrylic is cut away to access the ZIF sockets and quick release levers. The cuts are too small for us to get to the levers so we removed the top plate by unscrewing it.

We’ll be using this board to test lots of different PICs with piratePICprog, the new PIC programmer for the Bus Pirate.

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Bus Pirate script for 8×32 LED matrix

February 2, 2010 in Bus Pirate, binmode, scripts by Ian | No 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!

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Demo: Sure LED matrix

January 18, 2010 in demonstrations by Ian | 4 comments

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.

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