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HOW TO - Make a LED Dot-Matrix display
instructables.com — "This is a simple HOW-TO make your own personalised LED Dot-Matrix display. I will be adding the complete program with an explaination to light the LEDs with. It's also rather hackable, you can change it to suit yourself."
Alexius- 732 diggs
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- AlwaysDuggDown, on 10/12/2007, -10/+5Buy a Lite-Brite
- jsanders, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2i used to play with one of those all the time!
- dsmero, on 10/12/2007, -9/+4Buy your mom.
- tidu, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2Buy? I thought she was free.
Okay, that concludes this stupid spam.
- jsanders, on 10/12/2007, -7/+0a program just waiting to be hacked! omg it works on windows :)
- Klipart, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5How the hell does that work? Does it flash one LED at a time? Looking at the schematic it would appear that if the first column was on to activate the top left corner, activating any other row would activate the LED connected to that row and the first column.
- adamgamble, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I was thinking the same thing.
It appears that it turns on a column, and then a row to light an led.
Four columns by five rows.
If you lit A1 and wanted to light B3, wouldn't B1 and A3 also turn on? - prophet6, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I havn't looked at the guy's program closely, but the usual way of solving this problem is to only light one row at a time, and scan through them quickly enough that persistance of vision fills in the gaps. This is the way older video LCD displays worked (before TFT technology).
- ptrcd003, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yeah thats exactly how Matrixes work. You light a row really fast, then a column, in certain patterns, like letters, numbers, etc. Just has to be faster than your eyes can notice. Otherwise each LED would need its own channel, doubling the amount of signals required.
- adamgamble, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I was thinking the same thing.
- blakespot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3How to put together a text-oriented LCD (20 chars x 4 lines) and USB-based controller to output system status, etc. for Macs running Mac OS X.
http://www.bytecellar.com/archives/000081.php
(Will update story shortly - about to bring a 2nd, identical LCD online for more stats at once!) - lowmagnet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I was hoping for a LED laser display. Then I realised you weren't talking printers.
- tylerni7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They do make tricolor LEDs with 4 leads so you can have red, green, and blue on. It'd be interesting to expand on this project and then to make a large display with one of those LEDs for each color pixel. It would have to be huge for good resolution, but still awesome. Of course, they would also use more power and cost a lot (those multi-colored ones are expensive) but it is worth looking into I'd say...
http://www.google.com/search?&q=tricolor+leds - Tagg3rX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hurm looks easy....
- hellalazy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1so where do i get the circuit board?
- chrispy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you can spend the time making one... or you can just buy a matrix from kingbright.com. they're so cheap, it almost doesn't make sense having to making one. unless you already have the parts handy.
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