14: Working code!

After a lot of head scratching and a fair amount of tweaking the code has finally been beaten into  a working form. Because the hardware isn’t yet finished I have to capture the image by moving a camera with a long shutter speed across the board. The captured waveforms below show that the read/write cycle …

11: Globe PCB v2 arrives

The new boards are in, looking even nicer in matt than they did in gloss and ready for soldering. All those silly little mistakes from v1 have been taken care of so this should go smoothly.

10: Motor madness

After all the motor related issues of the first project I decided something pretty beefy was needed. If at ~480rpm my poor little DC motor was using about 180W, depending on the amount of power being lost as heat, it is fair to say that we will need about double that to be certain of reaching the …

9: Shiny new sliprings

These slip rings from MOFLON should mean that I never have to suffer the problems that the completely under-specced ones that I used back in the first display caused. Rated for 1500rpm with 4 power and 14 data lines these will allow the transfer of 5V up to 20A, HDMI and USB data and a tachometer pulse. Depending …

8: Safety first

The MKI used polycarbonate and aluminium for its case. Polycarbonate is well known for being bloody tough and easily worked, perfect for when you have no idea whether things are going to be flying off at you and you need to throw something together quickly and cheaply. The downside is that it tends to pick up and …

5: Globe Test PCB

Before investing too much time and money in designing the full Globe PCB a smaller test board was needed. The purpose of this PCB was to test the following: TFP401 interface with FPGA SDRAM interface with FPGA Modifying EDIDs FPGA SPI controller & interface with TLC5951 First version of code The board was designed as a …

4: Globe PCB design

POV MKI used 4 PIC32s each controlling 4 TLC5951 LED drivers which each in turn drive 8 RGB LEDs, with one of the PICs acting as master and the other three as slaves. Since we are only increasing the number of LEDs, LED drivers and required SPI control lines, we can either apply more microcontrollers to …