On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 02:43:57PM -0800, William Chops Westfield wrote:
> 
> On Feb 23, 2006, at 2:28 PM, Peter Todd wrote:
> 
> > Good point on the heat, didn't think of that one at all. LEDs
> > are what, 10% or so efficient?
> 
> Hmm.  You'd think someone would be putting ultra-bright LED chips
> in dot-matrix packages, give than they're used in high-visibility
> signs and whatnot.  Those you ought to be able to get by driving
> at 5mA average current or less...  It might be worth checking if
> such displays are available elsewhere...

Well, these ones I'm using because they are the absolute cheapest I
could find anywhere. Nothing else I found was even close to the 0.59each
price I got.

> I've also seen dot-matrix displays in up to 16x16 LEDs, which would
> make a 32 cube a bit easier...

Definetely! Definetely! I could probably put the driver circuitry on the
same board in that case. Right now I'm doing a two board design, routing
for the leds and LED drivers behind on a slightly smaller board.

Can't say I found any 16x16 LEDs though in my searching, 5x7's are
probably much more common due to their use to display text. 8x8's are
common, but only in corse dot pitches.


I found an interesting project similar to mine BTW:

http://www.ok.sfc.keio.ac.jp/2005/web/en/project/zagon/

They use 16x16 LEDs... Looks like they couldn't fit everything in the
one cube though, they've got a seperate driver board. Their cube is
smaller than what I have planned though, 2.5" aparently.

-- 
pete@petertodd.ca http://www.petertodd.ca
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