george miyagi
05-22-2005, 05:55 PM
Hello everyone
I am wanting to display dynamic graphics on an LED board for an art exhibition. But I seem to be going round in circles. I've been looking round the Basic Stamp site and boards for a couple of weeks and am still not too clear on:
1. what exact components i need
I've also looked at, and quite like, though they are pricey, the B64CDM range from Nexus
http://www.nexusmachines.com/Products/pdf/bifqdata1.pdf
which have controllers built into them.
or do i rather build my own matrix setup, using a LED 8x8 matrix and max7219 chips, which seems pretty scary.
I basically want to build an 8x16 dots matrix, and then migrate to something larger (64x32) - eventually building 5 of them.
or how would i go about this? what's the simplest and most cost-effective solution - i know that those two staments are inversley proportional.
Which development board should i start out with, or should i just go straight to breadboard. and what basic stamp model would you reccomend?
I'm on a mac so should i use the Keyspan USB converter, or is there something else.
My electronic knowledge is what little (and it is a little!) i can remember from school. so assume nothing. so i want to keep what i need to do down to a minimum. I also have severe time contraints.
2. can i use some other language to interact with the basic stamp (i have read of people using processing to talk to the stamp) if i have control over the serial port. And how does Wiring, processings serial comminucations sister app play into this equation http://wiring.org.co/
3. How do i acquire the dynamic data and feed it live (or semi-live) to the LEDs - the data is being generated from Flash - so i can XML/php/textfile/java to serve this data
5. Displaying: do i still need to address each pixel/LED seperately, or is there a way of animating them by some sort of screendump or other method. I've been experimenting with taking a series of gifs, then converting them to a binary series using processing, but surely there must be a more efficient way to animate.
Phew. i know, that's a lot of questions.
any help would be greatly appreciated
thanx
I am wanting to display dynamic graphics on an LED board for an art exhibition. But I seem to be going round in circles. I've been looking round the Basic Stamp site and boards for a couple of weeks and am still not too clear on:
1. what exact components i need
I've also looked at, and quite like, though they are pricey, the B64CDM range from Nexus
http://www.nexusmachines.com/Products/pdf/bifqdata1.pdf
which have controllers built into them.
or do i rather build my own matrix setup, using a LED 8x8 matrix and max7219 chips, which seems pretty scary.
I basically want to build an 8x16 dots matrix, and then migrate to something larger (64x32) - eventually building 5 of them.
or how would i go about this? what's the simplest and most cost-effective solution - i know that those two staments are inversley proportional.
Which development board should i start out with, or should i just go straight to breadboard. and what basic stamp model would you reccomend?
I'm on a mac so should i use the Keyspan USB converter, or is there something else.
My electronic knowledge is what little (and it is a little!) i can remember from school. so assume nothing. so i want to keep what i need to do down to a minimum. I also have severe time contraints.
2. can i use some other language to interact with the basic stamp (i have read of people using processing to talk to the stamp) if i have control over the serial port. And how does Wiring, processings serial comminucations sister app play into this equation http://wiring.org.co/
3. How do i acquire the dynamic data and feed it live (or semi-live) to the LEDs - the data is being generated from Flash - so i can XML/php/textfile/java to serve this data
5. Displaying: do i still need to address each pixel/LED seperately, or is there a way of animating them by some sort of screendump or other method. I've been experimenting with taking a series of gifs, then converting them to a binary series using processing, but surely there must be a more efficient way to animate.
Phew. i know, that's a lot of questions.
any help would be greatly appreciated
thanx