Late last night...as I was sitting around feeling sick, I decided I wanted to make one of those scrolling LED signs. It did kind of keep my mind of how I felt...as I soldered down 96 bus wire sections and 120 retangular LEDs. So anyway, here it is in all it's not terribly glorious, glory.

A couple of quickie tests seem to indicate that it's actually wired properly. In case you're curious that little 6x2inch (15x5) cm board has approximately 500 soldered connections. I just need to figure out how exactly to drive it. To make it work you have to switch on one column at a time (each on 1/24 of the time), two columns at a time (each on 1/12 of the time) or three columns at a time (each on for 1/8 of the time). Each has its pros and cons. I just wish I had a larger PIC microcontroller to work with (the IO on the PICs is perfect for these sorts of projects).

That's it for right now...I'll try to update this bog entry if I make any headway tonight

Update: did another test and found there were a couple of bad connections and one bad LED. Fixed that. Also dug thru my ICs and found that I had three addressable, inverting buffer/drivers (basically sets one of the eight outputs at a time to GND, which is exactly what I need!). I've even gone so far as to add wires and connect everything to a breadboard...and now I just have to write the software.

I'm going to just use raw data on the PIC (uses RETLW instructions). I even wrote a PHP script to generate the character set data for me (later I might have it generate it from an internal character set...but for now this is easier). The data generating PHP script (which will probably go away later...is, well, it's that link back there