A spherical persistence of vision display featuring a 1920 by 288 full colour resolution
Ok so this one was mostly my fault. Despite all the time I spent agonising over the schematic entry I ended up cocking a few things up. I was considering pasting and hot airing the board rather than manually soldering but since this would require doing each side of the board all in one go …
Continue reading “7: Globe PCB v1 – A somewhat mitigated disaster”
PCBs are in from China. I always buy two since most of the cost goes into tooling and it’s always good to have a backup in case you accidentally screw one up beyond repair. I used PCB Cart and I am pretty damn pleased with the service. I wont go into too much detail about the 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 …
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 …
The difficulty with the resolution is that at the end of the day it all comes down to size. More LEDs require more board space, more board space presents a much greater mechanical challenge and costs more money. MKI used 5mm clear through hole LEDs due to cost and ease of use. If these are all …
The Globe project started out in 2012 as my final year project of my bachelors degree at the University of Kent. Before I get stuck into this blog, depending on which end you are reading from, I fully acknowledge that this first version looks shonky as hell. Provide a third year with a tiny budget …
This blog has been written for those who are interested in the development of Globe and the design behind it. I have tried to keep the engineering terms to a minimum leaving it accessible to all, but if you do come across something that you don’t understand please do write a comment and I will …