9.24.2007

stribe limps forward


The first 30 seconds is where I plug the Wiring board into the wrong power supply and the Stribe sucks amps and fries 1/2 my led driver (MAX7221) ICs. An expensive mistake @ ~$8 each. Fortunately I only had one side plus the one on the top right hooked up. So while I await new 7221's I limp along with 7 partially-working chips. At the end of the video you can see where the cursor code is working - a couple of wiring glitches cause some overlap but this actually shows some interesting possibilities. What's hard to see from the video is that when two cursors are sharing a column they appear at 2 different brightnesses.

I'm working on a "hold" mode where the cursor will hover in place for a few cycles after you let go. I will also make the cursors height-adjustable and add "meter" mode where I fill in the leds up from the bottom. I like the way the transitions between led colors look so I will make the next led board in multiple colors of bar-graph. This time I'll use IC sockets instead of soldering all the meters in so I can re-arrange them to taste. Maybe red at the top and bottom of each column, then yellow then green across the middle. Or have each column a different color. Or I could use diagonals, or a curve....