Happy new year to anyone who reads this. Been busy with Christmas and new years stuff since my last update, but I did manage to make this Christmas ornament LED grid to test the speed of Arduinos shift out method.
I need to use as few as possible of the IO pins on the Arduino, as most of them are required for the synthesizers inputs (potentiometers and buttons). In order to achieve my goal of having a LED indicator or 7-segment display for every parameter of the OPL2 chip, I intend to use shift registers for controlling the LEDs as I can then control several LEDs using only 3 IO pins. I was not sure if it would be fast enough, or if the sheer amount of LEDs and subsequent bits that would have to be shifted out would cause a noticeable delay. It would also be a pain to solder a complete PCB for one of the OPL2 operators only to find out that the design was flawed.
The solution to figuring out if the shift out idea was viable, I build the 5x4 LED grid you can see in the short video above (it could also display one letter at a time and write "Merry Christmas"). It uses 3 shift registers chained together and thus only required 3 IO pins to control 20 LEDs, and it would be possible to extend this chain even further. It worked like a charm with no noticeable delays and I can now continue to build the first PCB board for one of the two OPL2 operators.
Apologies for the awkward aspect ratio of the short film btw.
Comments
Post a Comment