Hey,
Thanks for all the help I just reverse engineered the wiring on my board. Just have to make the arrays and then should be just about done.
And I actually put 18 LEDs in each stone
(please excuse my horrible text drawing skills)
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Anyways I put 18 LEDs in so I can also reprogram it to use as a basic text display.
Ill post more update stuff tomorrow!!
Ooh, forward thinking, I like that!
Makes the shift circuit a little bigger, need 3 per display instead of 2, shouldn't a big deal.
Well to continue:
Slapped the first layer of paint on the stones and lightly sanded it:
Onto something more electrical than wood and paint 
So I mounted the LEDs in short pieces of drain pipe:
):Looks like smooth sailing... well not really. The boards with the shift registers, in my finite wisdom I randomly wired the first one... doesn't sounds like a problem but with the whole dataArray stuff the all have to be wired exactly the same. Then there are the LEDs, the slight Dutchness inside me said: buy the cheapest, is best bro!! Now turns out is not best bro... They hardly give of any light, so had to order new bright ones. Either way progress is good, more updational goodness to come later today or tomorrow or whenever there is more to post.
Oh btw, I'm still not sure whether to make the stones clean black or roughen it up a bit for the aged look?? Any ideas??
I was on a short internship so that's why I havent been online for quite a while.
Anyways i did have some trouble which had to do with the leds.
Basically they were not bright enough so I added two extra very bright leds but to no avail.
I added a voltage regulator to each board to deal with the current but F'ed them up aswell.
Spencer,
A related thread took on new life with Strego working on building his oen FlipDots and working a scheme to power them.
Original plan to have self-return with non-powered magmet pull and flip withe electromagnet in on-state did not work. Now adapting to have dual polarity electromagnet (with 2 way current flow):
What'd you do with LEDs? You can get 12,000mcd & more white LEDs on 20mA, hard to believe those would not be bright enough.
http://www.dipmicro.com/store/LED5W for example
Order now & get a discount even.
Run 2 in parallel off 5V output pin with 120 current limit resistor on each for 15mA draw each.
I've read you can lightly sand the lens to diffuse it more too so will not look like pinpoint lights - if I recall you had them pointed sideways anyway towards sidewall reflectors.
I used 3 of these from 12V source in a scoring machine, at <2mA current, and they are bright! Couldn't even face them at higher currents,had to keep dialing them down, and they are 10,000mcd.
5mm Super Bright White, 10000mcd Non-Diffused LED
Hmmm alright, I'm drawing up some schematics as we speak. Regarding the LEDs, I used some tracing paper to cover the holes and during the day it was almost impossible to see the difference between on and off. Anyways I got some other stuff for my study to do now and just put together a new sort of bunk bed so didn't have that much time to continue this project.
Hmm, thanks for the idea! I loved it! =)
