Great Video, Pedro,. I see you are having fun and getting really valuable experience. Keep it up.
@ CR Those Pololu links were great. Good prices on good jumpers... 22 Ga. Too. Most of those jumpers with the round ends are 30 Ga wire... Caused me a lot of grief before I learned. $10 for 50 pieces is a good price because those last forever.
Yes as you may have noticed I am finding the coding side of things a steep learning curve whereas some beginners on the forum seem to pick it up rather quickly Oh well I will keep plodding along and yes I am having fun and that's the main thing,
I guess the reason I just want to control individuals LEDs is that I don't have the wires, etc. yet to make my matrix, but I do have enough to plug in 8 LEDs and start experimenting with them. I'm hoping to be able to learn about the Max this way as I wait for the other parts to arrive.
Can someone help me understand how the matrix works? I've wired up a 3x3 matrix as in the attached image (no Max chip at this point). My understanding is that if I apply 3.3 volts to row C and make column 1 ground, the electricity should flow through the bottom-left LED (as in the top-right of the image), turning it on. What seems to be happening, though, is that the electricity bypasses the LED and flows directly to the ground, meaning no LEDs light up (as in the bottom part of the image). This makes sense to me since electricity usually follows the path of least resistance. But everything I am reading online seems to indicate that what I am trying should light up the LED. What am I missing here? Can anyone help me out?
I should also note that I have a 100 ohm resistor at the beginning of each row.
That is a ridiculous price for the MAX7219. Well, the normal price is the ridiculous one...but $1.25 is unheard of. Somehow I think that can't last long.
FYI, I bought some from Ebay...10 for 4.99 $ 2 weeks waiting time but oh well
Aaron, glad you like my 8 x 8 displays. When I get home from work I will post the code. Good luck with your 8 x 32 enclosure, I am also working on one. The Max 7219 chips are very popular on the forum lately aren't they.
Sweet! Thanks Pedro. Oh and while I have you ans crossroads, my 8 x 32 is ......75% working......at first I had letters backwards and was looking at the code for the problem, but then I woke up and realized my column pin outs were swapped.....so the matrices are good on correct letters now, its just my code somehow makes all 4 say the same letter from my string as they each scroll.....I want them to scroll across one another......still WIP
I did play around with two matrices and LedControl and had this problem too. From memory (not stating fact) I had the number of devices integar set at 1 instead of 2
LedControl lc=LedControl(12,11,10,1); 12, 11 and 10 Arduino pins 1 number of Max7219.