Funny - I too was looking at one of these. Last time is was in
Silicon Valley I picked up 12 7*5 led arrays so figured a 7*60 sign
would be fun. Each array needs 12 pin drivers (ie 144 pins total).
Rather than MUX I thought of using 5450 serial parallel LED drivers
(these are 2 pin in 34 pin out) so I could use 5 and have
software/EEPROM do all the work. That would leave enough pins
on the 16F84 for a serial eeprom to hold the message data and
scrolling options.

I'm not a hardware guy so does this make sense - is there a better/
cheaper way.

Brian
Brian E Jones
Centre for Java Technology
IBM HURSLEY