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A project log for megaPanel: A Monochrome LED Matrix Display Panel

The megaPanel: (16) monochrome LED matrix panels, 8 bits, 120Hz

george-gardnerGeorge Gardner 11/13/2019 at 20:460 Comments

I just got off a 2 week project where I tasked myself with driving a RGB matrix display, HUB 75, P4, 64 x 32 pixels. I had an extremely great time learning and programming it, and it was my first introduction into the line of STM32 boards and ARM processors. Naturally, I wanted to go bigger, but I was only able to achieve a framerate of 45hz at a color depth of 24 bit, this with a 72mhz STMF103C8. The results were outstanding. After completion of this project, I realized more efficient ways of using this chip, as well as some hardware features that could be utilized to increase the framerate. On testing of this panel, I was using BMP files to display images that were resized to 64 x 32. One of the images I uploaded to the chip was a grayscale image of a cat. It looked fantastic, and I decided I could scale the project up with all white LED panels, since the lower drive requirements of switching from color to monochrome would alow me to drive a larger panel, or series of panels while maintaining a decent non-flicker framerate. I'm shooting for a minimum of 100hz refresh on this display.

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