BasicMicro - Forums

I am new to microcontrolers. I would like to design a control for a large array of LEDs which will have many more control points than I can get from a single microcontroler. Is it possible control one micro from another in a master/slave relationship to double the number of I/O pins that I can control?

Thank you for your time.

=Wadley

use LED driver chips. Or multiplex them.

Alan KM6VV

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Use the TLC5940 from TI or one of their varients. They are designed to drive 16 LEDs but you can mux them 8:1, 16:1 or even 32:1(I've done it) and get good results. Its not a simple project by any means but it was fun. We are planning on open sourcing our designs for the LED driver board we did a while ago but I'm not sure how long it will take to get that up on the website(don't exepect it real soon since we are swammped at the moment). We used 6 TLC5940 chips, an AtomPro 64IC chip and some shift registers for row selection to run 1000 RGB leds with a 72hz refresh rate(eg no noticable flicker).

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Basic Micro - Robotic Technology Evolved

Impressive!

Yes, the TI chip was one of the ones I was thinking of. ON has the CAT4109-D, TI has the TLC5946 that we use.

Alan KM6VV

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Thank you for the info. This is the sort of thing I was looking for. Knowing that it has been done already makes me a little more confident that I will be able to find a similar method.

W