Alpha Centauri

Big Alphanumeric Display Board – A pile of ultra-bright palm-sized 16-segment alphanumeric displays with network-based control

Ben Patterson

Following Follow project

Liked Like project

Become a Hackaday.io member

Just one more thing

To make the experience fit your profile, pick a username and tell us what interests you.

OK, I'm done! Skip

Similar projects worth following

110 views

0 comments

0 followers

0 likes

Description
Details
Files 0
Components 2
- View all
Logs 1
- View all
Instructions 0
Discussion 0

View Gallery

Description

This one has been sitting in a box for years. At the time I wasn't entirely sure how to power these huge and bright displays, but I did get the ideas around control right.

Using high power output shift registers, the 128 segments can be individually controlled from a single set of data, clock and enable pins.

Prototyping with the Freetronics Ethernet, an Arduino reference design with WizNet ethernet control is custom built into pluggable, multi-purpose modules supporting open lighting control protocols.

Components

16 × TPIC6B595 Power Logic 8-Bit Shift Register
8 × BL-S230B-12 LED NUMERIC DISPLAY Ultra White

Project Logs

Collapse

Fixing Shift Register Instability
Ben Patterson • 05/11/2017 at 12:06 • 0 comments

Such a simple fix! It occured to me that I had left the Shift Register Clear pin floating. Tying it high (active low) immediately stabilised the output and reduced flicker to imperceivable levels!

View project log