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Unread 17-03-2015, 16:37
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sparkytwd sparkytwd is offline
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FRC #3574
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Feb 2012
Rookie Year: 2012
Location: Seattle
Posts: 96
sparkytwd will become famous soon enough
Team 3574's Big Bling Board running on the Beaglebone Black

That's right, 6 pairs of safety glasses in a row, BBBBBB.



There's 9 1024 RGB LEDs, each individually addressable, for a 96x96 display (QQQVGA, probably).

What's in it:
  • 9 32x32 RGB panels
  • 2 9A 5v Pololu Voltage regulators
  • 1 Beaglebone Black
  • 1 LEDscape octoscroller shield
  • 1 2A 5v white box regulator

The panels can be found at Adafruit and Sparkfun. The shield was made by OSHpark.

On the BBB side of things, we can play any properly scaled video that FFMpeg can handle at over 60fps. There is a UDP socket on port 9999 that accepts compressed RGB frames to display, and we've written a pygame compatible library for that. Source modifications are here: https://github.com/hackcasual/LEDscape

One lesson we had with this that may be useful for other teams, big bright displays can cause regulators to dip their voltage outputs. We originally had the BBB wired directly to one of the panel voltage modules, but sudden changes in brightness caused the BBB to brown out.