interfacing tlc5940s with a arduino and pc

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

hi,

i've been playing around making animations and stuff with some tlc5940 (4) and leds (64, RGBW, the W led gives a better white than rgb=255,255,255) but am running out of memory to do anything fancy (animating using frame states), even with progmem. the "frames" are pngs exported from photoshop that are converted to rgb values with php like:

http://nay.xylene.com/images/png2html.png

i am only using (0-255) rgb values too, instead of the 0-4096 the tlc is capable of. (i realize that is a html table in that screenshot before, the array of rgbw is generated elsewhere). i've ordered a rogue robotics uMMC:

to play with. hoping it gets here this week! however i'm wondering about another solution to the problem of using serial from the pc with the arduino to play with the tlcs. at first i wanted to avoid using a computer to do the animations because it is quite tedious (eg: i can't leave it at the corner of the room to happily go about in its infinite loop). i've searched about google and the forums a lot of people seem to suggest using a computer->arduino->tlcs. i realize this might be a stupid question but can't I run the computer straight to the TLCs using something like:

thanks

ps. any helpful advice about animating with tlc5940s are welcome!
pps. i'm hoping after a plentiful amount of playing around to make a fully animatable led wall with like.... 16 tlc chips.

2

can't I run the computer straight to the TLCs using something like:

Yes you can but what is the difference between this board and an arduino?

It seems that this is just like a dumb arduino and will leave the computer to do all the clocking in of data and other time critical stuff rather than let the "intelligence" of the arduino do it.