This instructable is meant to be a more complete explanation than others available online. Notably, this will provide more hardware explanation than is available in the LED Marquee instructable by led555.
Goals
This instructable presents the concepts involved with shift registers and high side drivers. By illustrating these concepts with an 8x8 LED matrix I hope to provide you with the tools needed to adapt and expand to the size and layout your project calls for.
Experience and Skills
I would rate this project to be of medium difficulty:
- If you already have experience programming microcontrollers and working with LEDs this project should be fairly easy for you to complete and to scale to larger arrays of lights.
- If you are just starting out with microcontrollers and have flashed an LED or two you should be able to complete this project with some help from our friend google.
- If you have little or no experience with microcontrollers or programming this is probably beyond what you should be getting yourself into. Try out a few other beginner projects and come back when you've got some more experience writing programs for microcontrollers.
Disclaimer and Credit
First, I am not an electrical engineer. If you see something that is wrong, or not a best practice, please let me know and I'll make the correction.
Do this at your own risk! You should know what you're doing or you can cause damage to your computer, your microcontroller, and even yourself. I have learned a lot from the internet, particularly from the forums at:
http://www.avrfreaks.net I am using a font set that came with the ks0108 universal C library. Check that out here:
http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/ks0108/ Currently a work in progress.
http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-matrix-using-shift-registers/