On hold for now. Focusing on Soda Machine.
Contents |
People working on this project
- Will
- Jeff
- Tom
- Matyas
- Michael
- advertise to math students? maybe even biology?
Implementation Ideas
The gist of what Tom would like to see is a decent sized LED grid for posting marquees and programmable images that we can hang in the UPL window. Not only will it be an attention-grabber, but it would be a fun project at the same time.
Implementation ideas:
- Large sized grid. Ideally a power of 2 squared or rectangular.
- Agreed with this. --Will
- Parallel port/usb connection so a program on a computer can update the microcontroller "on the fly". This would be useful for announcements or displaying people's images.
- Sounds good.
Will originally suggested a "Game of Life" on it. This would be a terrific program to create some pretty images. I think it could be extended to whatever we want to display, coming from a computer.
- Going off on this idea, maybe we could write the microcontroller (or whatever) to read what to put up from a file, then write a variety of programs to output something in the correct format for the LED board to read. The hard part would be coming up with a format that would do everything we want. I imagine updating a file for every iteration of the game of life would be kinda messy, especially since we'd have to write the changes out, then have the LED board read them in. Maybe we can have two modes: read from file, and direct plug-in. Direct Plug-In would mean a program controls the board directly. --Will
Details Open for Suggestion
- Size of grid. Cost will probably be the largest factor.
- I asked Jeff, and we definitely have enough money for this. I think we have about $1400 from the University. We'd just need to ask Bart for that money.
- Color/brightness/count of Leds. There's so much variety here, we should brainstorm a bit and set a scope.
- I'd vote for blue or green LEDs. Brightness should probably be good enough to see clearly, but not so much that anyone will go blind looking at it late at night when all the lights in the main hall are out. Unless that's part of our plan for world domination...Could we get variable-brightness LEDs? --Will
- I doubt variable brightness LEDs exist, that don't cost a fortune. Basically LEDs light up when a certain amount of current passes over the diode, any less and it doesn't light. Anymore, and it burns out. --Jeff
- Use a breadboard like hookup for the leds incase they burn out, you just plug in another instead of having to unsolder and resolder?
- Yes. --Will
- LEDs can be over driven - basically, you supply enough power to burn them out but only have them on for half the time (or some fraction). this works because the human eye only updates at a certain frequency, so you just have to be faster than that. this way, you can have a lower power led run at the same brightness as a higher power one
Ideas
Get some plexiglass, and then put it over the LEDs to create a "pixel" type dealio. I (Will) think we should try doing this after we get a basic version up and running.
Applications
- Game of Life
- Binary Clock
Interesting Links
- http://www.fpga4fun.com/Opto5.html
- http://www.best-microcontroller-projects.com/led-dot-matrix-display.html
- http://electrosofts.com/parallel/
- http://www.arunet.co.uk/tkboyd/ele1pp.htm
- http://www.electro-tech-online.com/
- http://www.electro-tech-online.com/micro-controllers/24076-led-multiplexing-tutorial.html
- http://www.electro-tech-online.com/general-electronics-chat/68-led-matrix.html
- http://www.beyondlogic.org/
- http://www.avrfreaks.net/
- http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2734977
- A 4 dolla microcontroller
- An example of controlling 64 lights with 10 microcontroller outputs - http://www.best-microcontroller-projects.com/led-dot-matrix-display.html
- http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/21/1249200
