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Christmas SOC project (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi there,

I want to create my first (very small) soc project for christmas. I want to create a wildly blinking, very colorful christmas star.
In essence around 50 Leds need to be switched on an off repeatedly in specific patterns.

To make it as easy as possible for me it would be great if I could simply have a specific IO /GPIO pin for each LED. Then the code should be very straight forward.

Now is the question, which SOC should I use? a basically need next to no processing power/memory or anything really aside from alot of GPIOs. And off course it should be as cheap and easy to use as possible (plugin > soldering).

Any recommendations for something small like this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Of the top of my head an Arduino mega might do it (54 GPIO pins) plenty of ram and plenty fast for such a simple task. My only reservation there would be total current. LEDs tend to be on the high side but doable for driving direct from a GPIO but you need to balance that against overloading banks of GPIOs that have their own limits.

Otherwise you could look at simple shift registers with a smaller MCU such as 74HC595 to give you extra pins with less current limitations. Or look at LED driver ICs that give you PWM capability such as MAX6974 and similar

And lastly there are addressable LEDs these days that give you a lot of capability in a very small package such as WS2812 and similar.

Any of the non direct GPIO options can be implemented with pretty small/basic MCUs like the various arduinos and compatibles.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Thank you very much, that helps me alot and sounds like great options. The reason I shied away from MCUs compared to extensions boards and so on is that I dont really get how I would implement it and how this really works.
So awsome and cheap solution but I probably would need a pretty hand-holding guide/tutorial to use it. (Obviously my shortcomming though, great solution on your part :))

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

LED Multiplexing might be worth a look. It reduces the number of GPIOs needed and the code doesn’t get very complicated. You also don’t need any additional chips or special LEDs