January 26, 2013

LED Cube: SMT soldered, first test successful

Well, since the failure last time I've geared up some more. Sadly additionally to the equipment I also picked up a cold which interrupted my progress for some days. Nevertheless, it became pretty boring and so I decided to give it another try yesterday afternoon when my headace was merciful enough to allow me some hours of concentration.

I've learned two things through this second attempt:

  • a clean solder tip is really essential (which was the main issue the first time in retrospective)
  • solder flux is almost mandatory for SMT soldering

A big help was also to watch some SMT hand soldering tutorials. In the end I think I was able to fix my mistakes and I guess the soldering of the IC turned out not perfect but also not too bad.

From LED Cube Images

Looking nice, waiting for some action :) To check its functionality and if I damaged it during my previous drama it was quickly integrated into a test circuit on the breadboard.

From LED Cube Images

A manual test by quickly connecting and disconnecting the various pins manually resulted in a strong hint that everything was working but it seems that at 3.3V the IC is very sensitive on the CLK line and when holding the CLK wire just my hand while having it disconnected from 3.3V or GND it generated continuous clock signals autonomical to set or clear the OUT pins just fast enough to be recognizable. Since this could still be a hardware failure I decided to put together the first software fragments I have created in the meantime (a simple C++ layer for setting the GPIO ports).

A bit of debugging and tinkering later, where I already managed to light up single LEDs I was looking at this:

From LED Cube Images

This is a picture of the Raspberry Pi controlled LED driver circuit which is already continuously running a basic multiplexing logic which could be used to drive the prototype 3x3x3 LED cube. It's not visible on the photograph (there was some flickering visible in the camera's preview screen) but the LEDs on the right side are for controlling the layer selection and only one of it is turned on at any time. The LED on the left side represents the center LED set in the middle layer, therefore only turned on when the selection LED for the middle layer is also active.

Out of curiosity I also added some counter logic which tells me the refresh rate of the cube. It seems that I can update the 3x3x3 LED cube with about 500kHz when running at 100%. Adding a usleep(1) brings that down to 8kHz leaving the RPi idle with 60% so there should be plenty of reserves for additional logic to drive cube animations.

But one possible weakness of my design (driving LED cube directly via the RPi) showed first signs. I recognized very short and tiny flashes and blackouts in the LEDs while running my test application. It becomes more visible when I move the mouse pointer. This is very likely one of the effects of Linux being no Realtime-OS and running stuff in the background delays the update of the cube. Even if it's just in a milisecond scale it's very visible in a sudden surge or peak of the LEDs brightness. This will be one of the issues which I have to deal with later, probably by introducing a timing logic based on absolute time and spin-locking instead of relying on OS-provided delay methods. It may also be caused by voltage fluctuations caused by the RPi's CPU sucking more power during background tasks but that should be remedied when I build a proper power source (which is also planned for the cube, probably from an old ATX power supply).

January 22, 2013

LED Cube: Soldering SMD is not easy

Yesterday I received the last important parts which prevented me from starting to build up the concept circuitry in real hardware, namely the adapter boards for the LED driver SMD IC STP16CPS05. I also acquired a new soldering station and a fine solder tip to be able to work on the tiny contacts. I was not able to pick up solder flux and solder paste as it was not in stock but I decided in the evening that I still give it a try and solder the stuff simply with my 0.5mm solder wire.

To sum it up: it was a desaster. I had no problem with the first two opposite pins to fix the IC on the board but when I began soldering the inner pins the solder did not stick correctly, formed balls and began spanning several pins quickly. I had quite some problems getting the excess solder away from the pins and at some time even the desoldering wick became trapped between the pins. After an hour I managed to get most of the solder out of it again but the plan of ordinary soldering went down the drain. So much for that. I'll spare you the pictures of the incident and I hope that the IC and board were not damaged in the rescue process.

I now suspended the soldering activities again until I'm able to pick up proper SMD soldering equipment: solder flux, solder paste and desoldering wick with flux.

At least I did not make another mistake. Initially I planned to solder the connectors onto the adapter board prior to the IC so that I could stabilize it while soldering in the breadboard. Just later I found out that if I had done this, I wouldn't have been able to reach the IC pins anymore with the solder tip...

January 19, 2013

LED Cube: Scaling circuit to 8x8x8

While I've been waiting for the final parts to arrive (LEDs, SO-DIP-Adapter, ICs, etc.) I did some more theoretical work and tried to scale the 3x3x3 driver circuit to 8x8x8.

This is the result:

From LED Cube Images

This circuit diagram also shows one specific feature of my cube. I want to transmit the LED status via serial connection to the driver ICs but in contrast to eg. the solution on HNTE I want to transmit the serial data to all driver ICs in a concurrent fashion, not via chaining them. It should work by providing all ICs with the same clock and latch signal but running a seperate signal from the Raspberry Pi's GPIO to each IC's serial input. That way I can set up the configuration for a single layer with only 16 clock cycles instead of 64. I'm not sure if this works as expected. If not, I'll have to fall back to daisy chaining the ICs serial lines.

That's why I also tried to come up with a flexible solution for the software which allows me to quicly adapt the serial output if I have to change the circuit. My goal is to create an algorithm which determines the required clock/serial/latch output in an efficient way from an 8x8x8 LED status array. It should also be easily configurable so that I can port it from the first 3x3x3 prototype to the final 8x8x8 cube with minimal changes even if I have to change the driving circuit.

I had no success so far though which may or may not be related to the fact that I only found time to think about that in the past week after 11pm each day as I've been busy with other stuff earlier each evening.

January 11, 2013

LED Cube: RPi GPIO test and 3x3x3 concept circuit

As already mentioned in my LED Cube intro post one of the milestones on the path to a full-size 8x8x8 cube is a smaller cube for trying out my ideas and testing the fundamental theories on a smaller 3x3x3 cube. Of course on the way to a 3� cube there are more fundamental issues to solve.

The first issue is to get familiar with using the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi, as this will be essential for feeding the driver circuit later with the required animation/multiplexing data. So in the last few nights I've been busy downloading Raspbian, setting up the network connection with my computer (I don't have a HDMI- or Component-capable device available near the work area) and preparing the first GPIO test with LEDs.

It was a good first step which took a couple nights, but after issues with wrong resistors, not-working DHCP from my computer and a wrong connected Pi Cobbler ribbon cable, I could file success with 3 lit and controllable LEDs. These will represent the three channels which I will use later to feed the serial data to the driver IC.

From LED Cube Images

I also began drawing the circuit diagram using the free (for private use) EAGLE PCB Software. I did this to already have a better plan when all the parts arrive and maybe for a much later stage when the cube is ready and I bring the circuit from the breadboard to a custom PCB which is the other main functionality of EAGLE. The handling of EAGLE is a bit difficult, but an excellent (german) tutorial video for EAGLE helped a lot and covered everything I needed to finish the circuit for the 3x3x3 cube.

From Building LED Cube

The next steps on my plan are ordering the final parts, enhancing the circuit drawing for 8x8x8 and beginning to write the LED driving software.

January 8, 2013

LED Cube: The heart and concept of the driver circuitry

It is pretty clear that it's very hard to control 512 LEDs without some tricks. Most already built LED Cubes rely on two realization concepts to bring the cube to life:

  • some sort of integrated LED driver circuit (read: using chips)
  • use multiplexing / POV to lower the number of LEDs to be controlled individually

Using an LED driver IC to controll the large number of LEDs is almost a no-brainer. Although there are solutions possible to control that many LEDs without resorting to integrated circuits (e.g. Charlieplexing logic) they all come with one or more drawbacks like complicated wiring schematics, lots of additional required components or being only able to light a single LED at any time. Using a LED driver IC avoids all those problems and makes it possible to control many LEDs even for non-professionals.

Multiplexing takes advantage of the human eyes incapability to detect light pulses or variations in brightness if they happen just fast enough. It's the same principle which is used in TV sets and in the cinema. In a LED cube this principle is realized by only lighting up one layer of LEDs at any time and switching between the layers fast enough so that the human eye gets the impression that the whole cube is active. For an 8x8x8 cube this means that at most 8x8=64 LEDs (within one layer) are active at any given moment and the currently active 64 LEDs are switched within the 8 layers several times per second. This reduces the required logic to drive 64 LEDs and a simple selection logic to choose one of eight layers resulting in 72 wires leading to the cube.

The heart of my LED cube will be the STMicroelectronics STP16CPS05 (datasheet). I got the inspiration for this driver from this project and decided to use it because:

  • serial input possible using 2 pins (+1 for latch)
  • serial input accepts 3.3v, perfectly fitting for the Raspberry Pi GPIO
  • high maximum frequency of 30MHz, great for fast multiplexing (and probably software-driven PWM)
  • 16 output pins
  • simple integration and control (just clock in active/open LEDs and signal latch)
  • chainable (like done in HTNE's cube), but in my circuit this won't be required
  • cheap

One drawback of this IC is that it is not offered in a DIP-package which could be immediately used on a breadboard. Therefore I will have to solder the ICs onto adapters to use them on my breadboards and such adapters themselves are not that easy to come by.

Some friends suggested alternate ICs, eg. TLC5940, MM5450 or the MAX6962ATH but either are those much more difficult to interface with, have a smaller range of applicable voltages or I would have to use them in the same way as the STP16CPS05 without the ability to take advantage of their additional functionality. So I settled with the, in my opinion, simplest solution.

Update 2013-05-11 Found another possible alternative, the TI [TLC5925][9]. This looks like a possible replacement if I have problems with the STP15CPS05.

[9]: http://www.ti.com/product/tlc5925 "TLC5925 16bit LED Sink Driver]

January 6, 2013

Upcoming project: LED Cube 8x8x8

As already hinted last time my next electronics project will be a monochrome 8x8x8 LED Cube.

I chose this from a long list of possible interesting projects because its construction involves many of the areas in which I intended to work on something at some time.

  • Raspberry Pi programming
  • enhancing my basic electronics and soldering skills
  • beef up my electronics prototyping set
  • interfacing an uC/SBC with external hardware/components
  • creating an electronic circuit without step-by-step instructions
  • understanding and using an IC
  • designing and creating a PCB, maybe even etching it myself

LED cubes in particular striked my attention a few years ago but at that time Ialways repelled by the sheer complexity and number of components in most of the LED cube building instructions. But when I saw some another building plan for a LED cube I realized that I could use my Raspberry Pi to create a much simpler control circuit. And so the decision was set.

My plan for the next steps is to build a prototype (3x3x3) to test my whole concept, get comfortable with all the stuff and then scale it to 8x8x8. At first I'll set up everything on breadboard and maybe, if I'm sure that everything is finished on the hardware-side, make a permanent and smaller control PCB version. Probably as a Raspberry Pi shield.

The progress of this project will of course be documented on this blog.

January 3, 2013

Teaser

January 1, 2013

Building Adafruits Ice Tube Clock

As I've already hinted on in the past weeks I've tackled and completed one of my planned mini-projects.

I assembled the Ice Tube Clock from Adafruit Industries:

From Building Ice Tube Clock
This kit has been on my list for some time now, I stumbled over it on the internet two or three years ago and since that time I regularly checked if it was still available. After I finished my university degree the time was due and I ordered it the instant when there was one available at one of the distributors. When it arrived a few weeks later I prepared my soldering stuff and equipment and built it during two nights. As my last soldering has been already quite some while I decided to practice a bit with the [Pi Cobbler][5] which also arrived with the same order.
From Building Ice Tube Clock
When I was comfortable with soldering again it was time to unpack the parts of the clock and check if everything was complete according to the parts list.
From Building Ice Tube Clock
The soldering and building of the clock was pretty straightforward and easy. I carefully read the [build instructions][6] and had no trouble with the bending, soldering and checking the intermediate results. So here are just a few impressions from the build process. I also tried the suggestion to cut the wires of the VFD tube in different lengths, every wire a bit shorter than the preceeding one, before trying to thread them into the connector PCB. I think that this really helped a lot and made it much easier to finish.
From Building Ice Tube Clock

The last final steps could be completed similar to the previous ones. I only had some slight difficulties with the casing because I initially did not recognize the seperate page for the enclosure-assembling on the webpage but puzzled around a bit and eventually built it correctly without instructions. Manuals are for wimps ;)

From Building Ice Tube Clock

Setting the time and date finished off this neat project. Nice :)

A few mini-statistics:

  • 6h effort in two nights
  • 43 parts assembled
  • 1.5m solder needed
  • 1 solder-accident (although easy to fix)

Some possible improvements are still possible. Although I ordered the kit from a distributor in Italy it still contained only an american 9VDC power adapter. In my opinion shippings within Europe could already contain a proper european power adapter to spare the need for a US/EUR converter. Furthermore the assembly instructions on the webpage do not reflect the process 100% accurately but seems a slight bit outdated. For example there has been a change on the layout of the PCB as the capacitors C5 and C6 have a slightly different placement on the board than on the images in the solder instructions. Also the screws and nuts are not made of metal but of black nylon.

In the end I enjoyed this mini-project very much. It's comparable to the experience I had some time ago during finishing my Master thesis, where I had to code some stuff and had the feeling that I missed real deep code-writing at work. I also missed tinkering with stuff and crafting small things. Since finishing the clock I did also some mods for my mother. Enhancing an electronic candle which ran on a single CR 2032 for ~5 days to use two AA's instead, running now the second week on the first cheap pair of batteries and still pretty bright.

Currently I'm already planning my next electronics project. This time I will not take a kit which can be assembled by following instructions. Instead it will be something where I will have to deal with electronics, ICs and integration with my Raspberry Pi. And it will be not something which is build after instructions but will be designed by myself.

But more on that in a later post...