Again, Months have passed. But for me they have been productive months.
I am very happy with the output of the Freetronics DMD device mentioned in the above post. I have been able to modify (Butcher :P) the ShiftMatrixPWM library to work on these boards. I have even managed to get it working with 2 boards, 1024 red LED's, fully addressable and running at 50Hz with 32 brightness levels.
The way this hardware works though is very different to what ShiftMatrixPWM expects. I have had to make some major changes under the hood to format the information correctly to work with these displays. So much so I don't think you could still call this ShiftMatrixPWM anymore as it wouldn't work with a normal row/column "hand made" matrix. So I will call what I have made DmdPWM (all original credit goes to Elcojacobs for making a great library to base this off).
With this DmdPWM library now created and tested, I can finally start to order the components to make the display. So the display will consist of:
- 1 x USB to serial adapter (bought from ebay cheap)
- 4 x Arduino Duemilanove boards
- 8 x Dmd's
- 1 x 5v 40amp Power Supply
Currently I am testing with 1 Duemilanove and 2 Dmd's and using an ATX power supply (Looking to get a bench supply :)).
Here is a video being down scaled and serially sent to the Arduino with 2 Dmd's attached. This is just a fire effect on a loop.
I am still trying to round out the library code and clean it up but if anyone is interested in it, let me know. I haven't had anyone else test it yet. If you have one or a similar display (32x16, 1/4 scan and a zigzag register setup (not sure what to call it)) contact me.