Hi
I’m working on a side project where I’m making a lamp with 60 Sparkfun Alphanumeric Displays stacked on each other. I was just reading on Github and it says that you only can daisy-chain up to 4 displays on one bus.
I’m an artist and hobbyist so have small knowledge about electronics but I’m excited to start this project, any help would be appreciated!
Any idea how I would go about daisy-chaining 60 of these displays?
https://github.com/sparkfun/SparkFun_Al … no_Library
Thanks!
It would appear you can only have four on one bus, but could you have more than one bus?
60 divided by 4 is 15 you could have 15 different strings of 4 displays each.
What if you had some sort of selector switch that let you choose what 4 displays you wanted to talk too? That would enable you to talk to all 60 displays but it comes at the expense of more wires.
Looking at sparkfun’s website, I see a board called the qwiic mux and that has 8 ports. I bet you could daisy chain 2 of those and use each to select what chain of 4 displays you wanted to talk too. That gives you a maximum of 64 possible displays.
You’d still need to figure out how to power everything, 60 displays would probably draw more current than you can push through all those wires but at least you could get the data where it needs to be.
YellowDog:
It would appear you can only have four on one bus, but could you have more than one bus?60 divided by 4 is 15 you could have 15 different strings of 4 displays each.
What if you had some sort of selector switch that let you choose what 4 displays you wanted to talk too? That would enable you to talk to all 60 displays but it comes at the expense of more wires.
Looking at sparkfun’s website, I see a board called the qwiic mux and that has 8 ports. I bet you could daisy chain 2 of those and use each to select what chain of 4 displays you wanted to talk too. That gives you a maximum of 64 possible displays.
You’d still need to figure out how to power everything, 60 displays would probably draw more current than you can push through all those wires but at least you could get the data where it needs to be.
These are all great ideas, thank you! Good point about the power, that’s something I didn’t think of… What seemed pretty simple now might be a little trickier than expected ha!
Thanks again, all good ideas and thoughts. I will look into all of them!
A