Posts Tagged ‘:ftdi’
Cheap-Ass PC Interface for Digital LED Pixels
I have an unhealthy obsession with LEDs. I also have an unhealthy obsession with frugality…
Total Control Lighting is a system of individually-addressible full-color LED “pixels” that can be shaped into any display imaginable. It’s a new offering from Funhouse Productions, who’ve been marketing their Cool Neon electroluminescent wire to creative types for years now, practically defining the after-dark aesthetic of the Burning Man arts festival.
The appeal of the Total Control Lighting system is that it scales linearly…just chain one strand of LEDs after the next, like Christmas lights. One end plugs into a controller box, which can issue preprogrammed color sequences, or others can load animation data from an SD card. In more sophisticated setups, the controller in turn connects to a computer, which can then command every LED individually and in real time. That’s where this project comes in…
Tags: bitbang, c, cool neon, ftdi, led, leds, library, linux, mac, pixels, rgb, total control lighting, totalcontrol, windows
FTDI Serial Adapter as a Simple Digital Interface
I’ve had the good fortune to be accepted as an occasional contributor to the Hack a Day blog. (Hack being slang for an informal method of engineering, not criminal acts!)
My first substantive tutorial for the site describes the use of FTDI Bitbang Mode, a method of using a common, inexpensive USB-to-serial adapter as a quick & dirty GPIO interface. This facilitates the sort of prototyping typically done using microcontrollers, but in the comfortable and unconstrained development environment of mainstream PCs. The technique is particularly well-suited to SPI-type protocols; I’ve had this communicating with shift registers, LED driver chips and even video overlay ICs, as well as reading various optical rotary and linear encoders.
You can read the full article over at hackaday.com.
Tags: adapter, bit bang, bitbang, ftdi, hack, hackaday, hacking, interfacing, protocol, serial, spi, usb