Full Spectrum RGB LED lighting

[gduprey]

Howdy All,

Just thought this may be of interest here.  I just completed a project that allows full color control over RGB LEDs.

It's a controller board that you can hook up to 13 RGB LEDs up to.  Each LED can be set to one of 16.7 million colors (8 bit color).  You can also create simple color "animations" (change the color over X seconds/tenths/hundreds either absolutely or in a smooth wash).  You can program the controller with all your LED settings (colors, animations, etc) and save them to the boards EEPROM as power up defaults.

You can also easily change the lights over a simple RS232 (or SPI, if you are building your own controllers) commands.  This allows you do to all sorts of fairly nifty things with a little  software to squirt simple commands down the wire.

For example, on my cabinet, all the player buttons are clear (thanks to FXButtons).  Depending on the game I select to play, only the buttons that pertain to that game are lit and they are set to the color the appropriate button in the original game was.  Further, the trackball has a clear globe and is backlit with a RGB LED that lights up for games that use the trackball and has a nice color wash system.  Another LED is over the joystick and lights up to tell you if the joy stick should be in 8-way or 4-way mode (and turns red if the game calls for one setting, but the joystick is in the other setting so you know to correct it).

I've also rigged up the player buttons, a pause button and on the front of the CP, a free game button, reset and exit.  All buttons only light when appropriate for the game.

Anyway, that's a thumbnail of the control board.  You can download the CAD drawings to produce your own PCBs as well as the firmware code to program your own PIC controller.  Right now, I'm not offering any assembly, so if you aren't comfortable solder tiny SMD devices, you probably want to pass on this (or find a friend who can do it).

All the details and info are available here:

http://www.dvarchive.org/RGBLED/

FYI

Gerry

[Buddabing]

Hello,

Thank you for posting your project.

A couple of questions:

Where does the common anode plug into? The RGB LEDs I have  been working with have four wires, red, green, blue and common anode. You've got to hook the common anode to +5 or +3.3 volts somewhere.

Is is possible to control 39 single-color LEDs, or a mixture of RGB LEDs and single-color LEDs, with your board?

How are you determining which controls are active for a particular game? Are you parsing controls.dat?

Regards,
Buddabing

[gduprey]

Howdy,

Yes -- you can choose to view the board as 39 independently addressable PWM LED drivers.   The control protocol is geared around RGB stuff, but for the most part, you can treat the items as independent.  One thing that is wired in to RGB is the current control.  If you set 20ma or 10ma output for a "LED", it affects all three LED colors (R, G and B) so if you needed different current on each LED, you might have to group similar requirements together.  If you want more than 13 RGB LEDs, you can hook 2 or more controller boards to the same serial line.  Each board can have it's own unique address, so theoretically, you can control 3,302 RGB LED or 9,906 "normal" LEDs on a single serial port (in reality, loading on that line would be too much to drive so many boards without some sort of booster/amplifier, but you can easily run 6 or 7 controllers on a single line (maybe more -- I only have tried 6 so far).

The PWMs have a constant current source so you don't need any resistors between the controller and the LEDs.  The anode can hook to any DC power supply that shares ground with the controller boards ground and has a V+ of no more than 7 volts.  In practice, I use the same +5 that I feed the controller as the "common" for all the LED anodes.

As for the software, I've written a simple front end that I use.  It does use controls.dat to figure out how many buttons the game uses and which other controls (trackball, 4 or 8 way joystick or spinner).  However, since there is no color info about buttons, games that are "fresh off the boat" from control.dat have a pre-determined color pallet.  The front end allows you to then edit the colors on a per game/button basis.

It should be pretty easy to refit such stuff into a persons favorite front end.  Commands you send over the serial line look like

#000100 -- Turn on LED #0 on board #0
#0001FF -- Turn all LEDs on board 0
#000200FFFF00 -- set LED #0 color to yellow
#000000 -- Turn off LED #0 on board #0
#FF00FF -- turn all leds on all boards off

(both the board target (first hex pair) and the LED target (3rd hex pair -- command is 2nd hex pair) support wildcards).

You could even write a small app that was a wrapper around the MAME executable that looked at the selected game and controls.dat and configure the lights appropriately and then invoked MAME.  Then set your FE to run that instead of MAME and no changes are needed to the FE.

Gerry

[quarterback]

All of my favorite electronic boxes in my home meet in this thread.

DVArchive rocks!

Welcome to BYOAC, Gerry

[Kremmit]

If you're into DV, where is the video of your control panel with all the nifty lights? 

[gduprey]

I've been meaning to get together a console summary/pics and post it, just haven't had a chance yet.

And just to clarify, dvarchive isn't really related to the DV video format.  It works primariily as a ReplayTV on the computer (downloading shows from the ReplayTV and streaming them back, making your PC into a potentially huge video archive 9albeit in MPEG-2 form)).

[jfunk]

All of my favorite electronic boxes in my home meet in this thread.

DVArchive rocks!

Welcome to BYOAC, Gerry

I agree!  2 of my obsessions in one thread!  What are the chances?!? 

[Kremmit]

Oh- I got the wrong DVArchive- you're www.dvarchive.org, not www.dvarchive.com.