I have been working on a new type of LED display (well new to us) to work with smartie. I want to know some of your opinions before I spend a lot of time on this.
Here is what it is. It is an LED motion clock that has been modified to allow a user to specify what is on the display. It uses a pendulum arm that has 8 leds on it. As this arm swings back and forth the LEDs are blinked extremely fast to produce words. It gives the affect of the words hanging in mid-air. Here is a picture of one on ebay.
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Centrios-LED-Mo ... dZViewItem
Here is the deal. The clock is fairly stock, barely modified (so far) besides a PIC microcontroller. I can get it to display characters internally, but to get it to work with smartie will take some work. The amount of time that it takes to write a line of text compared to the amount it takes to read in serial data is long. Basically is anyone interested in this? is it worth the time to make it work?
J
Our new official repo is on github
LCD Smartie version 5.6 is released!
Download it now: https://github.com/LCD-Smartie/LCDSmartie/releases
LCD Smartie version 5.6 is released!
Download it now: https://github.com/LCD-Smartie/LCDSmartie/releases
New Project -- NEW LED DISPLAY
Moderators: _X7JAY7X_, caesar, IFR, mattcro, limbo, Fast351, hydrolisk1792
-
_X7JAY7X_
- Hardware Genie - Plugin Author
- Posts: 374
- Joined: February 16th, 2005, 10:24 pm
- Location: Michigan
-
mattcro
- Forum Supporter
- Posts: 590
- Joined: March 8th, 2006, 1:58 pm
- Location: Scotland
A few years ago I made a propeller clock while at uni, based on a design by Bob Blick. It uses the same principle as the clock you linked to but the LEDs actually spin in a complete circle. At the time, I remember seeing someone's variation on the basic clock that had an IR remote control receiver implemented in the PIC for programming the time of day and maybe a character message.
Some info and pics of my clock here and Bob Blick's original clock here.
If you use a pendulum type clock, I guess you can have the PIC, LED drivers, etc on a static PCB and a flexible ribbon cable to connect the LEDs on the arm. I haven't seen the innards of those pendulum clocks, just seen one in action. I don't suppose you'd get very many characters on the "display" - maybe 8-10? That will limit its usefulness for displaying system or media info etc. I'd consider it more of a novelty display.
The Bob Blick propeller clock uses interrupts (4MHz 16F84) to do the timing of the display (pretty stable and even digits) and to keep time-of-day. It's all hand-coded assembler. I guess you could do interrupt-driven serial port input from Smartie instead of the time-of-day with no extra overhead. The changes required for variable message display wouldn't be too significant (someone's done half of it already), but you have to watch the relative timings of code loops and table lookups to ensure the characters are consistently formed and spaced. It wouldn't be so bad with a 20MHz oscillator.
Some info and pics of my clock here and Bob Blick's original clock here.
If you use a pendulum type clock, I guess you can have the PIC, LED drivers, etc on a static PCB and a flexible ribbon cable to connect the LEDs on the arm. I haven't seen the innards of those pendulum clocks, just seen one in action. I don't suppose you'd get very many characters on the "display" - maybe 8-10? That will limit its usefulness for displaying system or media info etc. I'd consider it more of a novelty display.
The Bob Blick propeller clock uses interrupts (4MHz 16F84) to do the timing of the display (pretty stable and even digits) and to keep time-of-day. It's all hand-coded assembler. I guess you could do interrupt-driven serial port input from Smartie instead of the time-of-day with no extra overhead. The changes required for variable message display wouldn't be too significant (someone's done half of it already), but you have to watch the relative timings of code loops and table lookups to ensure the characters are consistently formed and spaced. It wouldn't be so bad with a 20MHz oscillator.
-
_X7JAY7X_
- Hardware Genie - Plugin Author
- Posts: 374
- Joined: February 16th, 2005, 10:24 pm
- Location: Michigan
10 character would be the max. It was something I had laying around and started playing with it. I have seen many LED spinning signs/displays but none that can be serailly controlled like this. It would be more of a novelty than anything else and system data would most likely have to be scrolled. I have actually put this project to rest because of the complexity of the code (i.e. character stretching, timing for the writing the display on the backstroke, serial data input timing) and my lack of time now since I have started school again.
J
J