ChriX
Member
I'm sure many of you have seen the music visualisations that can be displayed on a HD44780 based alphanumeric LCD display when it is hooked up to the computer.
What i'd like to do is create the same thing but on a much larger scale, from LEDs, so I can have a large computer controlled display on my wall. I think this is different from the scrolling LED displays you can get because as far as I know you can't write directly to the display to get the framerate needed for something like a spectrum analyser.
I found some LED display driver chips on maxim and have ordered a couple to play with. I was thinking I could use a PIC with serial interface to PC, and then PIC would send appropriate data to the LED drivers.
Here is some useful information I found: **broken link removed**
It says the smallest graphical array built with 5x7 blocks is 40x56 pixels, I was thinking two of these side by side would be good for my project.
I'd like some input on the idea if possible, is it too ambitious etc. Also they do a SPI version and an I2C version of this chip - which would be the better one for this sort of application (fast updating) and which is easier to interface to a PIC.
What i'd like to do is create the same thing but on a much larger scale, from LEDs, so I can have a large computer controlled display on my wall. I think this is different from the scrolling LED displays you can get because as far as I know you can't write directly to the display to get the framerate needed for something like a spectrum analyser.
I found some LED display driver chips on maxim and have ordered a couple to play with. I was thinking I could use a PIC with serial interface to PC, and then PIC would send appropriate data to the LED drivers.
Here is some useful information I found: **broken link removed**
It says the smallest graphical array built with 5x7 blocks is 40x56 pixels, I was thinking two of these side by side would be good for my project.
I'd like some input on the idea if possible, is it too ambitious etc. Also they do a SPI version and an I2C version of this chip - which would be the better one for this sort of application (fast updating) and which is easier to interface to a PIC.