LED Board Arrays!
Humanoido
Posts: 5,770
Dropped in at the Electronics store in Taiwan and saw these new boards about 1.5 x 2 feet in size with thousands of tiny surface mount LEDs all lined up across the board. You could make lighted pictures with these things. Amazing!
Comments
Thanks, Ken
I just got done soldering 192 red LED's to a piece of perf board to do exactly this. This is just like the time I hand soldered my L298 H bridge board only to see a prebuilt board on eBay for less than I paid for my parts.
Well let's see a picture of them.
I just left Taiwan and I'm traveling in China now but in the next followup which is expected to schedule soon, I'll see about taking my camera to the store for some photos. If I get to the parts store in China and come across this same part, I'll photo it there. I may even have a card in Taiwan from one of the companies if you care to read traditional Chinese.
Based on the interest and many applications for multiple LED projects, including banners, signs, images, advertising, store fronts, photos, numbering, counters, virtual instrumentation, various control panels, electronic product faces, massively large touch plates, robot expressions, wide band lights, displays of binary and different bases, multiple running clocks, and the number of BASIC Stamp and Propeller projects involving lots of LEDS, etc., I think this should be stocked by Parallax.
As I recall, they offered at least 4 different LED board density products. Two are more rectangular in shape and long, and two are very large and almost square. I was so amazed to see these products and was admiring the wiring array to see how they accomplished it, and looking at how tiny the surface mount LEDS are. It had a number of solder holes along the bottom of the board for tapping the arrays. I was deciding which one to buy and then my ride arrived and I had to leave suddenly.
As I recall, the store had an entire wall of assembled and kit LED products and some boards with around 200 LEDs, perfect for your project. I'll keep my eyes open for these next time at the parts store and get pics of these too.
It would really be fun to put several of these $20 boards together. I'm already thinking of a project to use many of these as input sensors to create a giant infrared telescope primary collector. Five of these can make a telescope primary objective five feet in diameter! The resolution of a 60-inch scope could see from here to half way across the Universe! I'm just drooling at the science possible with those boards and these Propeller chips:
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?124495-Fill-the-Big-Brain
BTW, this parts store was absolute Heaven! I entered the one store (expecting to see the other 50 stores) and spent the day there. I remember saying I didn't want to leave. I even found the selective cryogenic stuff to do my Propeller Brain project and all those meters I wanted. They had every part you can imagine and then more. I remember thinking, this is like ten times larger than the complete catalogs of products at all the big name parts suppliers like Digi-Key, Mouser, etc. in the USA. Now I realize, as it caught Ken's interest (as he is on top of this technology), I was undoubtedly looking at the latest stuff.
Martin, I don't suppose you want the kit..
This way when comes accross weird stuff like this he can just buy a few and ship them to Parallex World Headquarters.
Martin,
You've got me beat. 120 LEDs were enough to drive me a bit crazier.
I use mine to scroll text and as very low res video screen.
(I'm holding a small video camera top left.)
There is something very cool about a whole bunch of LEDs.
So true. We had fun making this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvuZd0b9e_g
Duane, I like the idea of sending the output of your machine vision to the LED's.
Erco, that's a whole lot of blinky lights.
Hey, I didn't say it wasn't strange. I know just how strange it is. But yes, you are among friends.
Hurry up and make a post about your project. I want to know how you're controlling all those LEDs.
@erco, I think I remember when you originally posted that video. Very cool. I think that was back when I was just a lurker around here. Thanks to Google I found where I'd seen it before.