Project Work

So, I've been gathering some parts to build a large LED light array and I'm just one piece short of having everything I need!   All of the components will be surface mount, so the board will be very small, and, unfortunately, very difficult to solder.  We'll see how it turns out.  I'll try to keep tabs on what I've done over either this blog or a thread in my personal blog.

My plans so far are to build a 64 element display with 12 bpp (4 bits per R/G/B LED) so that I can display 4096 colors on each "pixel" of the display.  The interface will be USB and I hope to write a C# application that will control the display (bear in mind I don't know C# yet, but this is a perfect opportunity to learn it).  Each R/G/B node will be placed into a 6" cube so that I have this recessed display grid of 4x4 feet.  I've been thinking of cool purposes for the app, and I might add network support so that people can send their patterns to the display itself and see how they look.  Animation support on it will be a must, and so determing the best way to send sequences of display frames should be interesting.  I'm also not sure how I'm going to be constructing the cubes, but most likely I'll either find some prefab plastic ones or will elect to make them myself out of wood or some other easily manipuated material (metal would sure be cool though).

Lots of challenges to overcome with this project, and I anticipate a few weekends of trial and error, but if I can get this system working it sure will be cool...