LED panels of any reasonable size tend to have fairly simple driving circuitry, which keeps the cost down but does mean you need to actually refresh the panel many times a second. This driver board does exactly that, meaning you can control the LED panel from your own project without having to worry about using up precious CPU cycles. Mind you, with the PIC18F2620 is a great microcontroller, and running at 10mips, it has plenty of power to run two 64x32 boards while maintaining a wireless network connection as well!
We’ve packed in a temperature sensor and battery backed real time clock (RTC) so you’ve got some interesting things to display as well.
The LED display panel driver components are all through-hole, while the temperature sensor, RTC, and 3.3v/5v level translator chip are surface mount. Even the surface mount components are pretty easy to hand solder, so if you’ve never tried it’s a great kit to build your confidence.
Note that the MRF wireless module is not included in the kit. While the board has been designed around the B version of the module, the A version will work with a little green wiring.
This product comes as a kit and requires soldering.
Platform: PLT-1001
Description: LED Display Panel Driver board
Hackability: 100% (full datasheet, schematics, source code provided; PIC comes pre-loaded with BoostBloader to make your own changes easily)
Microcontroller: PIC18F2620 running at 5v, 10Mhz (PLL enabled to 10mips)
Instructions: Tutorials – Building Kits - Building the PLT-1001
