Monopoly in Lights

Follows Directions

Got the new oscillators in the mail today, and swapped them into the circuit.  Much more reliable behavior, but still wasn’t quite as I expected.  So, I finally buckled down and went back to one of my original sources and made a stronger effort to faithfully replicate the circuit as presented.  Well, nearly faithfully.  I haven’t got the Not or Or gates in place, but seem to be doing okay enough for the moment.  I also connected the line running Blank on the TLC5941 to also hit the Reset input on the 4060 so that I can immediately restart the cycle of 4096 rather than waiting for the counter to get back up to that point again.  May not be completely necessary, but I wanted to maintain the full range of brightness possible.  Regardless, some measure of success!  Hooray!

Still a few glitches in the system.  When I tried to only light a few LEDs, the others would periodically flash on briefly.  I expect this may be due to my ignoring the warning to only send the XLAT command while Blank is active.  To do that, I’ll need to put that Or gate in place.  Should have a few laying around somewhere.  Also, I should run some tests on just leaving the Blank set for longer; that could actually give me greater brightness control if, as I suspect is the case, the whole Persistence of Vision thing means that brightnesses between 50% and 100% are virtually indistinguishable.  Should be some good testing, regardless.  For tonight, though, the core lesson of “Get what you’ve read about working before tinkering with it” is once again learned.

(And promptly forgotten.)

May 14, 2012 Posted by FoxFireX | Electronics | Comments Off on Follows Directions