Brads Electronic Projects Forum

Thanks brad, I actually just found the answer to that question before you posted it, but your post does has some info I didn't find. One thing I noticed that really caught my eye in your post is the screenshot of the swordfish IDE you have. Is that a MAC version of the swordfish IDE? If so, where di...

Thanks a ton Garth!!! All the information you have provided has been a load of help.
It all makes perfect sense and is explained very well. I don't think I could have gotten this project off the ground without the help of everyone who has posted in this thread.

I also have a question about swordfish delayms() and delayus(). How do I make sure that they are accurately delaying say 1 millisecond or 1 microsecond? I noticed at different internal clock speeds the delay time changes drastically. Is there a certain clock speed that will make them accurate or do ...

Great information from everyone! This project is getting more sophisticated each and every day :D Im going to go ahead and apply the method of scanning 2 lines at the same time. Since I'm scanning the rows... I will do it exactly as you explained brad.. row 1 and 9 together.. 2 and 10.. till 8 and 1...

Hey Garth. I just figured that out while playing around with pulse widths and different currents on an led. I'm going to end up using the high side driver for my display. The udn2981 and use that to drive the anodes. It is capable of outputting -500mA. For the 40 led row it will be powering that's g...

ok thats some good information brad!!! I totally forgot to take in account the amount of time the lights would be on. I have now decided to do a little test using 2 LED's to help me decide what method I am going to go with. the row scanning method will be represented by one of the LED's and the colu...

Another chip to look at is TLC5917. This is a sink so it goes on the cathode side but requires only one resistor instead of 8. I recall a 16 input is available?? but not sure. This chip is used so all the leds are same current draw which equals in some respect equal brightness. Another source chip ...

Thanks for the replies guys! My display is actually 16 rows tall by 40 columns long. My reasoning for scanning the columns rather than the rows is this: If I use (5) 74595 shift registers with 5 darlington arrays between them and the matrix columns and cascade them all together, I could easily send ...

Hi, I am planning on constructing a 16x40 LED Sign by using 10-8x8 mono color led matrices. I went ahead an ordered 10 common anode(the anodes are the rows) matrices and I am stuck at deciding how I'm going to drive it. I noticed that many people on the internet like to use a darlington array to dri...

Brad, Cant wait to see some new projects/tutorials from you. I like seeing all the things that can be done with electronics. I try to build things myself, but I struggle with things like...(when should I use a capacitor, driving LED's with enough power to get them all bright... etc.). It would be re...

Hey Everyone! my real name is: Gabriel .. but everyone calls me Gabby :roll: Im not new to this site, I've been sneaking around since 2010 lol!! :shock: I guess a late introduction is better than no introduction. I am a computer science student in the U.S. I have my A.S. in CIT: Computer Systems and...

No Problem... Ill attach the project to this comment.

However, be warned.. I woke up and wrote the project in about an hour.. so its not optimized. lol

Brad... I used Visual Studio 2012 for the windows version. It could have been written in basic or c++ as well, but i chose c#...

Also, I updated the main post with the new Mac version I made.

Thanks brad!

It's coded in c#.
I'll most likely make a MAC port as well, because I use my MacBook more often than I use my windows machine. I'll update the post when I do.

Hi everyone, I created a program to assist in the designing of new fonts for LED Matrices and thought that I would share it here for anyone that is interested in using it. Here is a screenshot: http://gabrieldsblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/pic.png I have described how to use the program here on m...