LED Tiles

Creator: Opticron Status: Research Born On: 22:38, 6 July 2008 (CDT) Last Updated: 16:47, 27 May 2009 (CDT)

Overview

LED tiles are just that, a piece of PCB with five RGB LEDs on them and a single white LED. They use a 16 channel LED driver with a SPI interface so that many can be driven from the same microcontroller. The idea is that you can play with just one, or tile them on a wall or other surface for neat visual effects like fading a color across the surface. The size of the PCB is yet to be determined. Initial prototypes will be through-hole parts, but further revisions will be on real PCBs with SMT parts.

Parts List

These two versions may be merged at some point or the version I create may use parts from both.

Prototype

• Breadboard
• 5 tricolor through-hole LEDs
• 1 white through-hole LED
• 1 16 channel DIP LED driver

Production

• PCB
• 5 Tricolor SMT LEDs
• 1 White SMT LED
• 1 16 channel SMT LED driver
• Header for pluggable SPI interface

Proposal

LED Tile Display

• Have a small 10x100 resolution display for simple text; time, date, outside weather, etc.
• Have a larger display that can display simple low-resolution images, animations and games (pong, space invaders, etc. as the controller permits). Something on the order of 50x100 resolution.
• Have a display that can operate on a resolution comparable to a computer monitor; CGA (320x200) to SVGA (640x480). A computer could be attached to display the IRC channel, presentations, etc.

Cost & Size Estimates

Assuming the tiles are 1" squares, each one is a pixel and cost 50 cents/pixel:

• 10x100 Display - 0.8'x8.3' for $500 (1,000 pixels)
• 50x100 Display - 4.2'x8.3' for $2,500 (5,000 pixels)
• CGA (320x200) Display - 26.7'x16.7' for $32,000 (64,000 pixels)
• SVGA (640x480) Display - 53.3'x40' for $153,600 (307,200 pixels)

In short, let's just stick with the 10x100 Display --Spacefelix 16:47, 27 May 2009 (CDT)