Question About P2-ES Accessory Set's LED Matrix Board

CJMJ

Why wasn't the LED Matrix board laid out according to its schematic? It would have been a lot easier to program instead of using the lookup table in the documentation.

JonnyMac

I think this is a case where the board layout engineer didn't consider the implications of the layout as it applied to software. In Hollywood, if you say "Fix it in post..." you'll get bludgeoned. The hardware version of that is "Fix it in code." I don't think it was malicious in this case, just unfortunate. Had contiguous pins been used, programmers could have taken advantage of the pin group feature of the P2.

My suggestion to Parallax is to do a peer review of hardware designs before finalizing and committing to production. This would catch problems like these, and allow for libraries to be available with the release of the hardware, something that would be welcomed by the community.

CJMJ

That's what I was afraid of. I was hoping there was some rationale to the design that I wasn't seeing. At NASA we would call this a 'lesson learned'. Something to be added to our "Lessons Learned" book.