futz
Active Member
Wanted to try out one of the Allegro A6276 chips I recently got. Digikey only had SOIC so I soldered one up with my last 18F248 cheapy (also SOIC).
The A6276 sure makes life easy for doing LEDs!
Really cuts the amount of wiring down. Reasonably inexpensive too - $2.64 in <25 quantity.
I drive it with hardware SPI, but you could very easily bit-bang it on a smaller MCU. It takes three wires to control it - clock, data and latch. The chips have a 16-bit shift register and sink drivers for the LEDs. They are cascadable, so you can build big displays easily.
In this pic I only have one of the two displays wired up (I wanted to check my wiring) and coded for. The long exposure makes it look like all segs are on, but it's actually counting 0-9 over and over.
**broken link removed**
The A6276 sure makes life easy for doing LEDs!
Really cuts the amount of wiring down. Reasonably inexpensive too - $2.64 in <25 quantity. I drive it with hardware SPI, but you could very easily bit-bang it on a smaller MCU. It takes three wires to control it - clock, data and latch. The chips have a 16-bit shift register and sink drivers for the LEDs. They are cascadable, so you can build big displays easily.
In this pic I only have one of the two displays wired up (I wanted to check my wiring) and coded for. The long exposure makes it look like all segs are on, but it's actually counting 0-9 over and over.
**broken link removed**
