6 ms·

Is there any available resources in which I can jump start my way into making these kinds of creations?

jrockway 5y ago
If you want to make an icosahedron, you're on your own, if you want to play with grids of LEDs, then there is a lot of stuff you can buy and write a little bit of code for. You could get something like the Matrix Portal and an off-the-shelf LED matrix to make an Internet-connected sign: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 (I use one of these to show the indoor and outdoor temperature, and it's only a few lines of Python.) If you already have a microcontroller in mind and just want a grid of LEDs, these are great: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444. I have a bunch of them wired in tandem to serve as a display for my GPS clock: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-clock/master/img/new-display.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-cl... Also, you probably don't need an FPGA to drive LED matrixes anymore. The RP2040's PIOs do a great job (the RP2040 is a $1 dual-core microcontroller), and honestly even a plain Cortex M0 does a perfectly fine job with cycles left over to run user code (for 64x32 grids anyway). The project this post documents probably could have been done with APA102s and a simple microcontroller spitting out a SPI signal to change their colors. No FPGA, no MOSFET bodges, etc. 2400 pixels is 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second.
- foobarian 5y ago
  > 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second I found that this adds up quick if you attempt variable brightness via PWM. At 1Khz this is 7.2MB/s of data.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Yeah, that's why FPGAs typically drive the matrix of dumb LEDs. But if you use APA102s, they remember their PWM setting, and a little chip inside each LED handles that. You just burst the data out over SPI, and the LEDs remain lit until you inform them of a new color to display. Expensive, but easy to use!

If you want to make an icosahedron, you're on your own, if you want to play with grids of LEDs, then there is a lot of stuff you can buy and write a little bit of code for. You could get something like the Matrix Portal and an off-the-shelf LED matrix to make an Internet-connected sign: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 (I use one of these to show the indoor and outdoor temperature, and it's only a few lines of Python.) If you already have a microcontroller in mind and just want a grid of LEDs, these are great: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444. I have a bunch of them wired in tandem to serve as a display for my GPS clock: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-clock/master/img/new-display.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-cl... Also, you probably don't need an FPGA to drive LED matrixes anymore. The RP2040's PIOs do a great job (the RP2040 is a $1 dual-core microcontroller), and honestly even a plain Cortex M0 does a perfectly fine job with cycles left over to run user code (for 64x32 grids anyway). The project this post documents probably could have been done with APA102s and a simple microcontroller spitting out a SPI signal to change their colors. No FPGA, no MOSFET bodges, etc. 2400 pixels is 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second.

foobarian 5y ago
> 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second I found that this adds up quick if you attempt variable brightness via PWM. At 1Khz this is 7.2MB/s of data.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Yeah, that's why FPGAs typically drive the matrix of dumb LEDs. But if you use APA102s, they remember their PWM setting, and a little chip inside each LED handles that. You just burst the data out over SPI, and the LEDs remain lit until you inform them of a new color to display. Expensive, but easy to use!