100 LED Display - Please help, my job depends on it!!

[leo.j.arnold]

Hello everyone,

As promised here are some pictures of the finished thing. Managed to get it finished in time after a very late night putting it all together on Thursday, amazingly it worked first time and I only had a couple of dodgy soldering joints on the LEDs to fix.

@MrRB - The PICs weren't supplied by the lecturers, I had to buy them out of the budget for the project, but they're only £1.70 each so not really a massive expense. I went to try and get the code off the lecturers yesterday afternoon but they'd gone home for the weekend so I can't post it!

@blueroomelectronics - I work for a university, my official job title is 3D visualiser and graphic designer, but I get given a broad range of projects to do.

Thanks again to everyone for all your advice, I apologise if anyone feels I've not listened to your suggestions but in the end I had to go with the solution of people who were on hand to help, however absurd it may be.

Let the torrent of criticism begin!

 

[picbits]

Looks good

 

[ericgibbs]

hi leo,
Construction looks A OK.!

Another thing you have learnt Leo, never volunteer.....play hard to get..

 

[3v0]

It looks good to me too.

It is done and working, that is the important thing.

3v0

 

[blueroomelectronics]

Very nice, and speedily done too!

 

[audioguru]

I am glad that you finished it nicely and it works well.
I notice that the LEDs have a very narrow viewing angle.

 

[Boncuk]

What particularly annoys me is this:
We go to all the work of suggesting an answer to a problem for these individuals, and they go away and thumb their noses at as and carry out some absurd solution. If one of my staff came the next day and said “Colin: My mother doesn’t think you know what you are talking about and she suggests I do it THIS WAY,” he wouldn’t see another minute’s employment.
We are wasting so much time on this forum; helping people that don’t really want to be helped – that’s because it is FREE! And no-one respects you when you don’t charge.

Hi colin55,

why not calm down a bit?

I guess we are about the same when it comes to progressive work. I had a studied electronics engineer who messed up a prototype board completely consisting of 80 digital and analog ICs by just using the wrong resistor values. It took me full three days to trace the errors and finally got that thing working as proposed.

Helping a forum member with an idea or a small circuit shouldn't be a problem. I've made my suggestion for this threat and that "was it". Reading the follow-on posts amuses me, foreseeing what will happen next - and sure enough it does.

Good advices, good schematics, etc. What for? The OP has already changed his mind.

So what?

I'm still somewhat choleric (as you are), but with increasing age it deminishes almost, but never totally!

Concerning charge, I guess it's a matter of business. Sometime an expected charge would make posters cautious - and may be think of their own. Anyway, charge won't hurt if you charge.

Be cool (part of "co(o)lin")

Boncuk

 

[Boncuk]

Congratulations for the well done presentation.

For how long will it save your job?

(not a question, but something to think about)

All the best

Boncuk

 

[audioguru]

For how long will it save your job?

Until the next project comes.

 

[MrDEB]

How tall is that SB1 rocket?

now you need to add a gorilla, a couple of model planes rotating around the top.
add some excitment.
when you reach your sales goal then the gorilla falls off.
nice looking project. still think bargraph leds would have been better.
now when you can, get a schematic and code.
we here are all in suspense.

 

[Mr RB]

Haha! I thought it looked a bit "Empire State" until I read the Nottingham conference centre bit down the bottom.

Looks nice Leo! And congrats on getting it done the way you wanted regardless of people arguing about the best way to do it.

And as an added bonus you coined your own joke;
"How many Leo.J.Arnold's does it take to change 100 lightbulbs????
...

One! (and 2 lecturers and 10 PICs)"

 

[kpatz]

Nice job!

PICs are cheap, if the quickest way to a solution is 10 of 'em, I say go for it. If you did it with 1 PIC then you're talking a slew of driver and gate ICs and probably more work than just hooking 10 PICs together.

They're in sockets, so after the sales target is reached they can be pulled and used in other projects. Or cut up the PIC board and use them in 10 different projects.

I hope they didn't use 20 MHz crystals for the PICs. Now that would be overkill. Heck, they could have just used the PIC's internal oscillators.