Which Microcontroller can Daisy Chain the Adafruit 32x32 LED Matrix Display

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wsg
 
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Which Microcontroller can Daisy Chain the Adafruit 32x32 LED Matrix Display

Post by wsg »

http://www.adafruit.com/products/607
http://www.adafruit.com/products/420

Hi,

I would like to daisy chain two or more of these LED Matrixx Display. Which development board and microcontroller can do this? I am not sure if the Arduino UNO can do it but the Due with the ARM might be able to handle it.

Has anyone done this? Is there a adafruit tutorial on this or some other webpage available?

Please provide any thoughts on this. Thank you. :wink: :mrgreen: :D :) :P

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Which Microcontroller can Daisy Chain the Adafruit 32x32 LED Matrix Display

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

The tutorial for the displays is here: http://learn.adafruit.com/32x16-32x32-rgb-led-matrix

As far as daisy-chaining them goes, that's pretty much unexplored territory. Displays like this are normally driven by FPGAs that have all the address and color logic essentially burned into hardware, run blazingly fast, and have hundreds of pins. Comparing that to a microcontroller is kind of like asking whether a moped or a motorized skateboard has a better chance of going head-to-head with a Formula-1 race car.

Regardless of the platform you use, there will be tradeoffs. If you want to use general-purpose microcontrollers, the biggest constraints will be pin budget and refresh rate. Something like an Arduino UNO has enough pins to do one channel worth of control at a time, meaning it has to write all 1024 LEDs worth of data, one byte after the other. A device with more pins might be able to divide the load, but that only pays off if you can write two data buses worth of information in the same amount of time it takes to do one.

You can buy more time by reducing the number of updates per second and the ratio of highest-to-lowest PWM duty cycles.. essentially reducing the number of colors you can display. That gets into design criteria that have less to do with electronics and more to do with personal taste and the nature of the job you want to do.

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