R/G LED Matrix backpack daisy chain

mark4:
I think I’ll try to follow Sparkfun’s “Using an Arduino to program an AVR” tutorial at http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/200.

I don’t have the LED matrix backpack in front of me. It may be tight to solder on the ISP headers, but I think I can manage it.

Thank you so much, I’m very grateful for your help!

I followed that tutorial and it worked fine, even with an Uno.

To get the headers on I separated the LED from the backpack and soldered it from the back.

Question - there are lots of errors in the backpack documentation.

  1. The input and output SPI headers are backwards as you know.

  2. The red and green LED codes are backwards. Red = 2, Green = 1.

  3. The pixel positions do not follow the documentation, either.

  4. The code they supply is for an earlier revision with some board errors and will not work unmodified on current boards.

Do you want me to fix number 2 or number 3? Not much I can do with number 1.

Number 2 - trivial or I can leave alone for compatibility.

Number 3 - I would need to know where you want pixel 1 and the order.

I have also optimized the code so that the SPI can run faster. I have the code instrumented with some pin level changes on writing to the transmit SPI buffer. I will see how fast it’ll go by looking at the pin outputs on a scope.

Initial tests look good with SPI_CLOCK_DIV8 (2 MHz), no delays on chip select going active, and only 5 us on chip select going inactive.

Jim