Main > Monitor/Video Forum
Golden Tee Betabrite LED Ticker display. PC Connect Software......Help
MosenAround:
Ok this might be a solution.
http://www.ultimarc.com/pacled64.html
I have emailed them to see if it will work.
I will kep you posted
MonMotha:
--- Quote from: MosenAround on February 12, 2013, 03:04:20 am ---If I replace the two eeproms I can then go on to run a Beta bright program or similar?
--- End quote ---
Sure, you could write a program that runs on the 68k (on the LED sign board) that emulates the Betabrite serial port protocol and is therefore compatible with the PC-side software. You'd put this program on the two EPROMs and replace the ones that are on there now. Writing this program is left as an exercise to the reader.
--- Quote from: MosenAround on February 12, 2013, 03:30:36 am ---Ok this might be a solution.
http://www.ultimarc.com/pacled64.html
I have emailed them to see if it will work.
--- End quote ---
The LED sign is electrically somewhat weird. It's two parallel matrices that are the entire sign wide and one "character" high (if you look, the sign is made up of a bunch of individual LED array modules, and there's two of them stacked high). The rows are scanned high-side on the "backpack" board (the one with the micro), and the columns are scanned in on basically a 2x parallel SPI bus. The micro has to actively scan each row. I don't think there's any particularly good way to rig up a PACLED64 to do this, but Andy knows more about it than I do.
In particular, note that you can't just hook each dot up to the controller. You wouldn't want to, anyway: you'd need like 25 controllers to address the whole display. You also can't really hook up the columns and rows to the controller and scan it in software since the columns are a couple of giant shift registers, not discrete IOs.
MosenAround:
Not sure hoe to quote you mon mother but you had my head turned sideways trying to understand most of what you said about the PacLed64.
Also I dont know how to write programes to the eeproms....
Its looking like I sell the LED light board on and get a PC compadibe one....
Thanks for youre input
DogP:
This seems to be the place for the discussion on these toppers, so I figured I'd join in. A friend asked me to look into interfacing one of these... I looked at pictures online, and it looked pretty simple. Well... when I pulled his apart, I found that he had the single board surface mount version, which isn't nearly as nice to connect to. I figured I'd play around with it anyway, and after figuring out exactly how it all worked, I made a plan for interfacing to it.
So, after lifting pins and soldering wires to a microcontroller (Parallax Propeller USB Proto board), I wrote some simple code to toggle the bits manually, to verify that I knew how everything worked. That worked, so I made a framebuffer, tossed a test pattern in it, and wrote some code to output the framebuffer to the LEDs. From the picture, you can see it works (that's not just random garbage, that's my test pattern). :) Now I just need to add some smarts, like a font, so it can be programmed to display messages. I'll also be adding a raw mode, to give full control of the display over the USB port.
I also dumped the TSOP flash chip and disassembled it, but didn't really spend much time trying to figure out how the protocol. I figured the cooler thing would be to have full control of the display, rather than just being able to change location name and stuff like that. I don't have a Golden Tee, so I'm not able to just sniff the RS232 lines... that's probably the easiest way to figure out the protocol if anyone's looking to just change names and stuff.
DogP
MonMotha:
Interesting...you have a different rev. than all of mine. Mine both have a "backpack" board separate from the display board itself. The display board has all the little shift registers, while the "backpack" has the controller (m68k SoC) and high-side drivers (PNP darlingtons). The program is also on a couple of UV erase EPROMs. The surface mount flash appears to only be used for storing data. There's also a place for an RTC, but it's not populated (there's an empty socket, though).
Like you, I figured an easier thing to do would be to just replace the controller entirely. However, that was made even easier by the fact that the controller was completely separate from the display and connected by a cable. I just never got around to doing it.