Thursday, January 28, 2010

Other projects on hold: Starting 60 RGB LED spinning display

It upsets me every time I do this, but I do it often. I can never finish anything. Most of the time I can get down to just a day's worth of work left and then completely lose interest. I can blame the Parallax forums for this, for I get most of my ideas from it. Another thing that will hold me off from finishing a project is hardware, where I will have a very nice program that works great and has a good user interface, but I have no hardware to put it on! Oh, well, I'll get more project ideas at UPEC, enough to last me a year. Now onto the project:

Idea:
This is the first project in my life that I am not doing alone. Matthew (mctrivia) is getting the hardware done for this project. The project was his idea after seeing my Spinning Light Display. He then told me he wanted me to write the program. The board will be straight, with RGB LEDs down it controlled by serial latches. I can send out a serial command that is 180 bits long (number of LEDs) with 2 pins (clock, serial) The LED driver will have to be in ASM, which is unfamiliar territory for me, as of I just learned it (or started learning, for a language is never completely learned) but I agreed anyway.

Progress:
This project is in the early stages. The serial shift-out driver is made, and in about only 12 lines of code too, and the graphics function is being worked on. Text will only be shown going around the device, not straight across. This would require a large amount of processing, so it is omitted. The coordinates are given in polar, but I have already integrated a built in Cartesian to Polar converter.  Oh, the text has only been desided on, not integrated yet. Updates to be posted. Please leave a comment if you have an opinion.

UPDATE 5/30/10:  Matthew has decided that this project will not be a good investment, so he has decided to change his interests. I am now working on a touchscreen project for him, but it too is failing, for he failed to realize the difficulty in downloading programs from Ethernet.

No comments:

Post a Comment