Time Circuits
Designing the Time Circuit Display PCB
It’s been a long road to get to this point, but I’m finally at the stage where I can design the printed circuit board (PCB) for the time circuit display.
It’s been a long road to get to this point, but I’m finally at the stage where I can design the printed circuit board (PCB) for the time circuit display.
I’ve chosen the LED displays, found a matrix driver, and determined the final positions for each LED display on the faceplate. The next step in the time circuits project is to build a dedicated circuit board for each display. This process starts with creating an electrical schematic.
Now that I know exactly what I’m looking for, it’s time to buckle down and try to find some real-world LED displays for the time circuits.
Now that I have a tentative plan for how I’m going to control all 300-some LED segments, the next step towards making this prop a reality is to figure-out the specifications for the LED displays.
I have no formal education as an electrical engineer, so one of my first steps for the time circuits project is figuring out how to drive the large number of LED segments that make up the three time circuit displays.
The goal of this project is to build my own personal replica of the DeLorean’s “Time Circuits”, as featured in the Back to the Future movie trilogy. I’ll need to build custom time circuit displays, a custom keypad for changing the date, and screen-accurate enclosures. To make everything function, I’ll need to design and program some embedded circuits to control it all.
Last fall when I was working on the now-defunct ‘Footwell NeoPixels’ project I wrote a short post talking about how you cannot use the FastLED library with RGBW leds, and have to deal with the clunkier Adafruit NeoPixels library.
Well last week a man named Jim Bumgardner commented on that post and shared his method for doing just that: using the FastLED library with RGBW leds.
I’ve been messing around with MIDI for my musical floppy drive project, and it was surprisingly difficult to find detailed information on how to get started with Arduino’s MIDI library. So in this post I’m going to show you, in detail, how to use this library to control anything on an Arduino using MIDI.
(more…)