Hello,
Had a look around the forum and wider web, but can't find anyone doing what I'm after; just wondering if its possible really! I'm new to Arduino, but have dabbled a bit with PICAXE and Python in the past.
I have an old LED scrolling message display, made up of 19 5x7 bicolour LED matrices - in the long run, I'd like to be able to do swanky things like email and social media monitoring with it, but for now I'll settle for scrolling text. (It actually has a serial interface onboard, but the only hints towards protocol that I've found is some Perl that someone wrote to control it. I'd rather treat it as an electronics project in any case).
Having cracked it open, all of the existing control and storage circuitry is on one PCB, with the displays and drivers on another. its all lovely mid-90s single-sided PCBs with through-hole components and big tracks, so fairly easy to hack about with 
.
The 7 red and 7 green row anodes are currently directly driven via Darlington pairs. The cathodes for each of the 95 columns appear to go through 12 SM6B595 drivers (which seem to just be 8-bit shift registers capable of sinking big loads).
Am I right in thinking that I should be able to drive this using the normal matrix route to drive the columns, driving the row transistors either directly or through another couple of shift registers?
Should an UNO be able to handle driving this 95x14 matrix, or do I need to be thinking bigger?
Cheers,
Freddie