Das Blinkenlights (rodyne.com)

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

> Off topic: blog posts

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

That's when you design in a PC board stiffener. These are just pieces of metal, U-channel, L-channel, or solid bar, to add some structural strength. Cheap and easy, but rarely seen in hobbyist work. Any board with buttons or knobs or connectors unsupported for more than a few inches should have some stiffening. You have to allow space for stiffening bars when designing the board, and you need to place screw holes.

They are simple to work with. Each LED has 4 connections: GND, +5V, DATA IN and DATA OUT. Each LED grabs the first 24 bits of the data stream (8 bits for Red, Green and Blue) and sends the rest on DATA OUT for the next LED.

Blinkenlights isn’t a german word it’s pseudo german for Blinklicht originating from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights#:~:text=on%20the...

But the Chaos Computer Club built light installations called

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blinkenlights

There's a joke if you have IPV6 connectivity where if you use IPV4 it says it has full colour support but if you do... well, it doesn't!

https://blink1.thingm.com/

It would be nice to explicitly attach a (FOSS) license to this. (Apologizes if there is one and I just missed it)

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html

(It ran the very cool "BeOS" operating system[1], which was eventually ported to Mac, then x86.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

It means that instead of being mounted to a PCB and having the light shine "up" from the board, it instead shines down between the solder points, and you arrange for the PCB to have a hole there. It means all the components are on one side, but the light is emitted on the back which can be clean and/or have cool silkscreens etc. Nice!

[1]: http://www.kingbrightusa.com/category.asp?catalog_name=LED&c...

> First problem there are not enough GPIO pins on the 28-pin PIC to drive 128 LED’s, plus an address line, plus a serial receive pin, minimum GPIO’s for that is 24 (16×8 LED scan matrix)+4(address)+1(RXD) = 29. A simple solution is to add two 74HC595 shift registers to increase the outputs by 16 at the expense of 4 pins to control them.

Wouldn't the simple solution be just to split the matrix in half and throw second PIC in there? Or just make 1U panels instad of 2U?

Also the PIC is rated to sink/source 25 mA so you could have skipped the led driver transistors, making the boards even simpler.

      >> unsigned char ascii2dec( unsigned char data) // expecting a hexedecimal num 0..F anything else returns 0
  {
  if(data=='0') return 0;
  if(data=='1') return 1;
  if(data=='2') return 2;
  if(data=='3') return 3;
  if(data=='4') return 4;
  if(data=='5') return 5;
  if(data=='6') return 6;
  if(data=='7') return 7;
  if(data=='8') return 8;
  if(data=='9') return 9;
  if(data=='A') return 10;
  if(data=='B') return 11;
  if(data=='C') return 12;
  if(data=='D') return 13;
  if(data=='E') return 14;
  if(data=='F') return 15;
  if(data=='a') return 10;
  if(data=='b') return 11;
  if(data=='c') return 12;
  if(data=='d') return 13;
  if(data=='e') return 14;
  if(data=='f') return 15;
  return 0; // default/error

I could probably think about a little bit shorter function for that ;)