With the LED characters in-hand, the next step is to write an embedded program to display integers and strings on the time circuit displays. The goal is to be able to set the characters for each display group based on simple variables, so doing something like displaying the time returned from a real-time clock (RTC) becomes trivial.
Now that all of the time circuit display electronics are in the mail it’s time to talk about programming the display. This starts with learning how to control LEDs with the Holtek HT16K33 integrated circuit (IC), which I’m using as the display’s matrix driver.
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I have no formal education as an electrical engineer, so one of my first steps for the time circuits project is figuring out how to drive the large number of LED segments that make up the three time circuit displays.
The goal of this project is to build my own personal replica of the DeLorean’s “Time Circuits”, as featured in the Back to the Future movie trilogy. I’ll need to build custom time circuit displays, a custom keypad for changing the date, and screen-accurate enclosures. To make everything function, I’ll need to design and program some embedded circuits to control it all.
Last fall when I was working on the now-defunct ‘Footwell NeoPixels’ project I wrote a short post talking about how you cannot use the FastLED library with RGBW leds, and have to deal with the clunkier Adafruit NeoPixels library.
Well last week a man named Jim Bumgardner commented on that post and shared his method for doing just that: using the FastLED library with RGBW leds.
Last spring before this blog was a thing, I created an “Oddshot Button” using a hacked Staples Easy Button. The button was simple – while watching a Twitch stream, a press of the button would instantly create a video clip of the last 30 seconds using the Oddshot service.
A few months later Twitch debuted their own ‘Twitch Clips’ service, and Oddshot has since fallen out of use. So I decided to remake this project to work with Twitch Clips!
I’ve been messing around with MIDI for my musical floppy drive project, and it was surprisingly difficult to find detailed information on how to get started with Arduino’s MIDI library. So in this post I’m going to show you, in detail, how to use this library to control anything on an Arduino using MIDI.
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Now that I’ve calculated the theoretical framerate limits, it’s time to measure the actual framerates my Adalight device is putting out.
Using a logic analyzer and an Arduino Nano, I’m going to measure the framerate at varying Prismatik “Grab Intervals” and baud rates, and compare those numbers to what my calculations predict will happen.