In my component drawers I have a LTP-7357AG, which is a matrix of 35 green LEDs conveniently packaged in a 12-pin display. I wanted to play with it so I began to hook it with my Arduino Uno. This post is part of a series about programming Arduino applications in C.
I’m going to show the results first, and then give an explanation of what I did and why. The following image shows that the Arduino is capable of showing a letter on the display.
I made this by writing a library in C that handles the LED matrix when it’s connected to particular I/O ports, and together with the library I wrote a main program that displays the “B”:
#include <util/delay.h>#include "ledmatrix.h" // The header of my library.#define FRAME_RATE_HZ 50 // This feels sufficient#define SUBFRAME_RATE_HZ (FRAME_RATE_HZ * N_SUBFRAMES) // N_SUBFRAMES is in ledmatrix.h#define SUBFRAME_DELAY_US (1000000 / SUBFRAME_RATE_HZ)int main(void){ struct ledmatrix_frame fB = // struct ledmatrix is a 5-bytes struct holding a 7x5 frame. LEDMATRIX_FRAME_INIT( // A helper macro to write frames easily 11110, // This structure contains a "B" 10001, // 1 means LED is on 10001, // 0 means LED is off 11110, // they are transformed into binary numbers by "magic" in LEDMATRIX_FRAME_INIT() 10001, 10001, 11110); ledmatrix_setup(); // Initializes ports and stuff. while(1) { ledmatrix_draw_next_subframe(&fB); // Turns on the LEDs of the next subframe. _delay_us(SUBFRAME_DELAY_US); // This loop+delay might be replaced by a periodic interrupt. } return 0;}This is the internal diagram of the component:
The elemental principle for each dot of the display is that if I drive row 1 high and drive column 1 low, I will light up the dot at coordinates (1,1), and if I drive row 1 low and column 1 low I will keep it off.
In the tutorials that can be found online on how to drive a LED matrix, they usually scan the matrix by row or by column. I decided to scan by column, so I hooked one resistor for each row pin. The LED matrix datasheet indicates that each LED has a forward voltage of 2.1V at the typical operating current of 20mA. Given the 5V output of the Arduino I/O, this suggests to use a resistor of around 145Ohm, but I used 220Ohm resistors because that’s what I had available; the downside is that the LED will be less bright because less current will pass through it, nothing dramatic though.
I wanted to connect the LED matrix pins as orderly as possible in terms of Arduino pin numbers, so I started from pin 0 that corresponds to PORTD0 of the ATmega chip, but I had problems with pins 0 and 1 probably caused by the connection to the USB-serial converter mounted on the Arduino Uno.
This is the final wiring of the Arduino to the component:
Note that the colours of the wires match the photo at the beginning of this post. This is a table that explicitly indicates the connection:
LED matrix - Arduino COL1(PIN1) - PB0(PIN8) COL2(PIN3) - PB1(PIN9) COL3(PIN10) - PB2(PIN10) COL4(PIN7) - PB3(PIN11) COL5(PIN8) - PB4(PIN12) ROW1(PIN12) - PB5(PIN13) ROW2(PIN11) - PD7(PIN7) ROW3(PIN2) - PD2(PIN2) ROW4(PIN9) - PD3(PIN3) ROW5(PIN4) - PD4(PIN4) ROW6(PIN5) - PD5(PIN5) ROW7(PIN6) - PD6(PIN6)
In many examples, when performing a column scan, the active column is driven low by a pin, while the others are not driven: the I/O of the Arduino are configured as high-Z input. In this way one can light up each dot of the column by driving high or low the corresponding pins. The problem with driving 7 dots at once is that the Arduino I/O that keeps the column pin low is sinking too much current: the ATmega datasheet indicates a maximum current of 40mA per pin, but each dot needs roughly 20mA, so we should at most light 2 dots. Some people suggest using a current sink IC to solve this problem, but I don’t have such an IC yet in my inventory, so I decided to consider 2 dots at a time instead of a full column; the dots considered at one time is what is called “subframe” in the code. The following GIF shows the scan of a “B” with a column scan that considers at most 2 dots at a time:
I have uploaded the code on Github; this is the header of the library that I wrote: ledmatrix.h
Basically the information of which dots to light is encoded in a 5-bytes structure, and there are macros to “draw” a frame with ones and zeros. Then there’s a function , “ledmatrix_draw_next_subframe()“, that is used to draw two dots and contains in itself the state of which dots are being considered next. With this library is it possible, for example, to have an alphabet of 128 ASCII characters in 640 bytes of table and display them one by one to spell a word.
The library implementation instead is here: ledmatrix.c