can arduino control 1000 leds

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Frequently-Asked Questions
#1

just wodering can arduino control 1000 leds … liek i wanted to make a large led matrix that come to a grand total of 1050 leds just wondering what would i need to control all those leds…im guesing an arduino but im not sure what else i would need

#2

Hi,
yes it should be possible have a look at these tutorials
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/LEDMatrix

Eberhard

#3

There are a few important questions you need to ask yourself.

Do you need individual control of the LED’s ? or are they turned on/off in groups ?

Is on/off enough or do you need to dimm them to have light levels in between on and off ?

How important is timing ? when daisy chaining som of the LED control chips you can run into propagation delays after a certain number of chips in the chain.

Will the Arduino boards 16 KB of program memory and 1KB of RAM be enough for your project ?

These issues might or might not be problematic, but you should consider them carefully.

#4