monteI had a working prototype, and charlieplexing worked, almost as intended. One part that was missing was the font. George Mason omitted this part in his patent, so we don't know how it was supposed to look, except maybe for one letter - M.
Anyway, when I first saw this design, I was surprised by the potential variability it proposed for making fonts for it. It had serifs! But also you could make a sans font, several variants of numbers, and even a full Cyrillic alphabet if your heart desired.
The only thing that was needed was some kind of a tool to be able to design the glyphs and translate them to a suitable format for use with limited resources of CH32V003. In the firmware, I decided to store every glyph as a 32bit integer, where every bit from 0 to 20 signified a corresponding LED in a chain. To make a font and convert it to an array of bytes I created a simple web tool where you can turn segments on and off and will get a number that represents the glyph you've created. Then I also added the ability to share your creation as a link, because I wanted to send some funky (or goofy really) letters to friends.
The looks and functionality are going to improve because I want to be able to compile a full charset and maybe export it as a rasterized sheet (or even better, as a real font file).
You can try the tool and see if you like the letters that this display can produce, or maybe find some symbols that are beyond known alphabets and are only possible with it.
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