Arduino

Speeding up your SPI MAX7219 LED displays when using Arduino and LedControl Library In preparation for the arrival of my GPSDO[1], I’m doing a quick build of an “Atomic Clock” display to have above my lab equipment. I’m using a cheap, small eight digit red LED SPI-controlled display. It uses the MAX7219 controller that I got from eBay for next to nothing. I plan to parse the RS232 information from the GPSDO unit and display the exact time. I’ll also post error messages if the GPS signal lock gets lost. I’ve done a quick prototype using an Arduino Uno, but I plan to try to get an Attiny85 to work as the controller when I’ve finished the parser and the rest of the software. After doing some research, naturally, there was a library available to connect to my LED display called LedControl. It’s part of the standard Arduino libraries (in the download section). But when I checked the code, it uses the Arduino routines to shift out the SPI data to the display. It’s great if you want to be able to use any pins to connect to the screen, but using Arduino’s bit manipulation tools for “bit-banging” the display is slow. ...

Adafruit TRINKET – Mini Microcontroller – 3.3V and 5.5V versions: It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATtiny85, a little chip with a lot of power. A cool cheap little Arduino compatible board for smaller projects. The 3.3V version runs at 8MHz and the 5V version can run at 8 or 16MHz. It has five I/O pins available and comes with 8kb of memory. It can be programmed with AVRDude or the Arduino IDE after some small modifications. Looks great!

My twelve year old son want’s to learn how to program. My first idea was to teach him Ruby or Python, but I decided to go with Arduino. It’s C-based so that’s a good start I think. Were currently planning a couple of projects but so far he’s managed to get some LED’s blinking. A good start.