More animations

I finally settled into my new place in Sunnyvale, so you can expect more posts here. I added some animations to the LED cube: a heart beat, an elevator, a cube drawing and a slow glow effect. Especially the glow effect is impressive (you can't see the LED blink) and only possible due to the way the cube was wired. Other effects are trickier, though, hopefully I can define one of the trickier ones tomorrow.

LED cube video

And here is the video showing the result.

Source code for LED cube control

The source code for the LED cube control is now available. Basically PORTB and PORTC of the PIC16F57 (which is actually a low end device) are used to control the output. I'm looping one bit through PORTB and one bit through PORTC to address all LED.

Fourth layer picture

This is the LED cube with the fourth layer completed. It worked immediately: I wrote a small program to test individual control of the LED and was succesful at lighting each one individually. Now it is time for the hard part: creating animations.

Fourth layer

The fourth layer is finished, but not attached yet. Hopefully that will happen tomorrow, together with my first animation. Video should be provided.

Third layer

And here is the third layer of the cube. I also rewired the connections so the cathodes and the anodes are each on their own port. One more layer, which doesn't need any more connections, and the circuit is finished.

Pattern

I succeeded in creating a two part pattern loop. An issue was that blanking the image in between each shift caused the LED to be less bright. By adding a delay the impact of the blank could be reduced, however, initially there was too much delay and the pattern seemed to be blinking. The correct code is as follows:

PatternDelay
  call Blank
  movf p1,w
  movwf PORTC
  movf p1+1,w
  movwf PORTB
  call SmallDelay
  call Blank
  movf p2,w
  movwf PORTC
  movf p2+1,w
  movwf PORTB
  call SmallDelay
  decfsz delay+1,f
  goto PatternDelay
  decfsz howlong,f
  goto PatternDelay
  retlw 0

Here the two patterns are in p1 and p2. As you can see it is relatively easy to extend to more patterns. The next step would be to write an application that can find the minimum sets needed to display a certain pattern.