45 replies to this topic

[wirralbret]

i'll have to have a good look this weekend myself, it's been a hectic week in work this week.

?? but I don't understand this bit of your last post:

The bit I don't quite fully understand is the way the row decrement system works.

[TTX]

i'll have to have a good look this weekend myself, it's been a hectic week in work this week.

?? but I don't understand this bit of your last post:

The bit I don't quite fully understand is the way the row decrement system works.

On the left hand side of the board there are 2 down counters, I'm guessing they're something to do with the row select...

[wirralbret]

ah, with you now.,....

I'm just guessing here too as i've not looked at them for a while, but the counters may operate in binary output, these possibly drive the input to the multiplexer chip for row select.

[ady]

And just in case of a Mis-Calculation I do believe this.....(as Posting 22/02) will contain a replacement lol.....

Tris blow the babe

Attached Files

•  P1010007.jpg   50.82KB   32 downloads

[TTX]

Yay, cheers Ady!

[edwardb]

When I worked at Mazooma, there were pictures of the old BWB and Castle factories on the walls. John Bonner and Richard Wilson (a 'B' and a 'W' in BWB) had old press cuttings on their office walls.

As for Dave Powell, his later creations were Epoch and then Eclipse (Epoch on a single board). Don't know if he still has his helicopter (see, there *is* money in hardware design ;-) ). I am told when he worked at Maygay he used to fly to work...he currently works for Tioga in Derby, who develop embedded systems for various things. Good bloke, very good hardware engineer, savvy businessman too...

[TTX]

...he currently works for Tioga in Derby, who develop embedded systems for various things. Good bloke, very good hardware engineer, savvy businessman too...

Edward, you are a STAR!!! I'm going to see If I can contact him re Castle documentation. Hopefully I'll get a reply... Cheers!

[TTX]

Well, I've sent an email to Tioga. Fingers crossed for a reply.

[ady]

Well, I've sent an email to Tioga. Fingers crossed for a reply.

Five day's..........come-on Tioga (please), a n00b trying to learn stuff here lol

[TTX]

The problem is that Tioga are nothing to do with it, they are a potential barrier between me and the main man. I wouldn't be half surprised if the email was bounced or ignored.

edwardb - If the email gets bounced by Tioga, any idea how to contact Dave by any other means?

[wirralbret]

are you trying to contact dave powell?

[TTX]

are you trying to contact dave powell?

I'm attempting to! No reply as of yet...

[TTX]

Hey wirralbret, you still around? I've made progress with the display board!

[ady]

Hey wirralbret, you still around? I've made progress with the display board!

Nice One mate


http://www.fruit-emu...html#post145012

[TTX]

It works but it's not perfect. The PIC16F690 I'm using isn't fast/powerful enough to display more than 7 rows at a time without flicker but at least I've got the serial input format sussed!

Attached Files

•  DMD.zip   1.39MB   43 downloads

[ElevenOf9]

Hi TTX, I'm new here but I've been following this thread for a while. Congratulations on getting the displays working, I also have 4 of these displays that I am very keen on doing something with. I was going to have a go at figuring out the inputs for them over the next few days but it seems as though you could save me a lot of time here, is there any chance you could give me some pointers on how to drive them, obviously you need the 60 display bits for each line but how do you select which line you want to use? Any help you could give me, or even the sourcecode for your test circuit would be greatly recived.

[TTX]

Hiya, nice to see a new member interested in the technical side of things!

To illuminate a single line, perform the following steps:

1. Clock in 64 bits for the column selects (bits 57-60 inc. are ignored);
2. Clock in 8 bits to select a row to drive (0x0 = bottom row);
3. Clock in 8 bits to determine the row brightness (0x0 = 100%);
4. Pulse the Strobe;
5. Repeat 1-4 for the next row.

NOTES:

a) All inputs are inverted.
Tie ENDISP to ground or you get nothing!
c) The input order of the column data is not what you'd initially expect!
d) The logic and VDISP supplies can be from the same source.
e) Be sure to feed it at least 1 amp @ 5vdc.
f) Do not leave one row on for too long, you may blow a row transistor. I don't know what the clock frequency should be but it's much higher than a PIC16F690 @ 8MHz can handle by software alone. I must borrow a scope sometime and probe one of my machines...


What are you planning to use your displays for? Are they all the SP.ACE type or do you have Castle MACH2000 ones?

[ElevenOf9]

Wow, thanks for such a quick reply, that is exactly the info I was looking for, I think I would have given up long before I figured all of that out myself.

All 4 of the displays are marked "SP .ACE MATRIX DISPLAY BOARD" and a friend and I have 2 each. We have a couple of ideas in mind for them but they are fairly ambitious such as web enabled message boards or even online 2 player tetris, but to begin with I would be more than happy with a basic "hello world" type thing running but it looks as though I am going to have to dig out some 20MHz crystals first though.

[ElevenOf9]

I've been hard at work with this today and after wasting almost an hour due to the assembler and pic programmer using different files I eventually made some progress. I used a PIC16F628A running at 8MHz and if you use interleaving to draw to the screen (write rows 0,2,4,6,8 etc then rows 1,3,5,7 etc) then there was virtually no flickering even when writing to all 21 lines. I took a while to figure out the most significant bit first / least significant bit first but that was a simple change in the code to get that working properly. All in all thanks to your guidelines it was fairly easy to get the whole thing up and running, which considering I have had the displays here for almost 2 years and not known how to use them to get this far in a day is unbelievable. So I have to say ...

Attached Files

•  Matrix.zip   1.72MB   32 downloads

Edited by ElevenOf9, 30 December 2008 - 12:11 AM.
Broken link

[TTX]

Excellent, glad to help!

I never thought to interleave the rows, will give it a go. I'm also writing in (still learning) C at the moment so that's probably slowing it down a bit. Time to learn Assembly I guess!

Did you need any extra components in your setup? Mine wanted a small cap from the data input to ground, without it I get nothing!