Newbee project

alfa88

I just finished the Boe-Bot and decided to tear off the Basic Stamp board to drive a 6X6 led matrix. I am real beginner at programming so I hope someone will hold my hands so to speak. What I have done is use P0 through P11 as outputs. P0 through P5 are the X axis and P6 through P11 are the Y axis. The program I wrote simply addresses each led with the high/low commands. I then replicated the same code 10 times and changed the pause each time to speed up the scan. I am hoping there is a better way to do this because I used up the RAM in a hurry with my simpleton program.

SRLM

If you have a 6x6 LED matrix, isn't that 36 LEDS? Unless if you are having multiple LEDS per IO pin, how are you setting this up?

metron9

Dont replicate the code, reuse it by making a code block in a subroutine that you set a variable to the amount of time for the pause command. Then in your main loop you can do a for next loop to do the 10 scans at different speeds by calling the subroutine.

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Think Inside the box first and if that doesn't work..
Re-arrange what's inside the box then...
Think outside the BOX!

alfa88

Yes, slrm, that's 36 leds. As for metron9, I am programming virgin. I sort of get what your saying but how do you manipulate a subroutine that has the pause command in it. Here is an example of what I did to get row1 of 6 to blink.

'1st scan

HIGH 0
LOW 6
HIGH 7
HIGH 8
HIGH 9
HIGH 10
HIGH 11
PAUSE 125
LOW 0
HIGH 1
PAUSE 125
LOW 1
HIGH 2
PAUSE 125
LOW 2
HIGH 3
PAUSE 125
LOW 3
HIGH 4
PAUSE 125
LOW 4
HIGH 5
PAUSE 125
LOW 5

Steph Lindsay

Hello Alfa88,

I'm glad that the Boe-Bot has inspired you to start buiding your own projects!· For an example of efficiently turning on and off groups of I/O pins in patterns with a single command, take a look at Chapter 6 of "What's a Microcontroller?" - it's about controlling a 7-segment LED, but it's an easy introduction to using OUTH, DIRH, etc.

You can download the book (and many others) free from this page:

http://www.parallax.com/tabid/535/Default.aspx

Have fun!
-Stephanie Lindsay
Editor, Parallax Inc.

metron9

Here you have 16 lines of code using HIGH and LOW commands
Reduced to 5 lines in a for next loop

The 6th line is a debug output to show the state of the pins (can be removed)

There is one logic difference in that pin 6 is set HIGH on exit of the code, one additional line to turn bit 5 off after the loop and reducing the loop count by 1 would be more exact. If bit 6 was not used then it would not matter.

' {$STAMP BS2}
' {$PBASIC 2.5}
' {$PORT COM1}
i VAR Byte

'LOW 0
'HIGH 1
'PAUSE 125
'LOW 1
'HIGH 2
'PAUSE 125
'LOW 2
'HIGH 3
'PAUSE 125
'LOW 3
'HIGH 4
'PAUSE 125
'LOW 4
'HIGH 5
'PAUSE 125
'LOW 5
 
'code above reduced to 5 lines of code + the debug output that can be removed 
OUTL=1
FOR i=1 TO 6
 PAUSE 125
 OUTL=OUTL*2        'shift the Bit over 1 position
DEBUG BIN8 OUTL, CR 'this line outputs the value of pins0..7 on the screen.
NEXT
 
 

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Think Inside the box first and if that doesn't work..
Re-arrange what's inside the box then...
Think outside the BOX!

alfa88

Metron 9,

Thank's for your help. I'll play with it. Just as a graphical aid I made a pictorial of what I'm doing.



---- Anodes----

J0 J1 J2 J3 J4 J5
J6 O O O O O O
J7 O O O O O O
J8 O O O O O O
J9 O O O O O O
J10 O O O O O O
J11 O O O O O O

Post Edited (alfa88) : 8/15/2008 5:37:38 AM GMT

alfa88

Thanks to Steph's hint I have slashed a whole lot of code but now I have another problem.... I have a hunch J0 through J11 are not necessarily P0 through P11 on the BoeBot board. Hopefully this will be easy to sort out.


The code:

' improved 6x6 led scanner program

' {$STAMP BS2}
' {$PBASIC 2.5}

x CON %100000011111
x1 CON %010000011111
x2 CON %001000011111
x3 CON %000100011111
x4 CON %000010011111
x5 CON %000001011111
x6 CON %100000101111
x7 CON %010000101111
x8 CON %001000101111
x9 CON %000100101111
x10 CON %000010101111
x11 CON %000001101111
x12 CON %100000110111
x13 CON %010000110111
x14 CON %001000110111
x15 CON %000100110111
x16 CON %000010110111
x17 CON %000001110111
x18 CON %100000111011
x19 CON %010000111011
x20 CON %001000111011
x21 CON %000100111011
x22 CON %000010111011
x23 CON %000001111011
x24 CON %100000111101
x25 CON %010000111101
x26 CON %001000111101
x27 CON %000100111101
x28 CON %000010111101
x29 CON %000001111101
x30 CON %100000111110
x31 CON %010000111110
x32 CON %001000111110
x33 CON %000100111110
x34 CON %000010111110
x35 CON %000001111110

OUTH = %000000000000
DIRH = %111111111111


index VAR Byte

DO

FOR index = 0 TO 36

LOOKUP index, [noparse][[/noparse] x, x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6, x7, x8, x9, x10, x11, x12, x13, x14, x15,
x16, x17, x18, x19, x20, x21, x22, x23, x24, x25, x26, x27, x28, x29, x30, x31, x32, x33, x34, x35 ], OUTH



PAUSE 100

NEXT

LOOP