#1

Hi,
Can anyone tell me what the LED driver in the newer varibright monomes is?
I have an arduinome 128 I built some time ago when monomes were much harder to come by.
It’s running off a couple of teensy’s and unsped sheilds so it’s a bit of a clumsy software setup and it only supports a single brightness.

I basically have a nice aluminium panel, wooden enclosure and 128 buttons LED’s that are fine running off some fairly antiquated electronic brains. In the interest of non disposable technology and wanting to learn more about hardware programming I want to update it.

I tried writing firmware for the teensy that used software PWM to address individual brightness and it worked but was super flickery, researching more I see Tehn mentions this is the case with the older hardware. I’m thinking about putting together a new LED driver/button scanner board and running it from a teensy or similar.

I couldn’t find any schematics for the newer grids.
If anyone has info on the more modern hardware it would be appreciated.
Dylan.

#2

TLC5940

this is a good introduction:

1 Like
#3

@tehn
Awesome, thanks very much.

Man, times have changed since the original arduinome hardware.
$6 gets you something that would drive my whole 128 matrix in monochrome

I’ll look into the TLC5940
It seems there are breakouts for reasonable prices also.

Will post back if I get anywhere useful/non flickery =)

#4

@tehn
So to clarify in a 16 x8 grid are you doing something like driving 8 columns with a shift register and then scanning the 16 LED rows with the TLC5940?

I guess then the update rate is limited by how fast you can scan through the shift register?
Let me know if I’m making any sense at all.

Happy to just read some firmware source or something if that’s easier than explaining, I could only find the source for the older non varibright units which use the Max chips (I think).