MBI5030 starter board

Again, the boards come from Hackvana .

Again, the boards come from Hackvana .

Minimal effort to get started with the Macroblock MBI5030 PWM LED driver. Comes with onboard LEDs, but can still drive external ones. All pins broken out. Only needs a microcontroller and a high-frequency grayscale clock. An AVR running at 16MHz can use its CLOCK-OUT pin for the latter. The chips 'speaks' an SPI-like protocol. Unfortunately some information is encoded in the timing of the LE input, so one cannot use fast hardware SPI for the hole transfer. The special sequences must be bit-banged. Nevertheless it is a rather affordable chip and does mostly what it should. There is an issue with the datasheet(s) that can be found on the web. The older ones document functions that definitely are not implemented in the current silicon.

Too bad I don't have any 0603 LEDs...

Minimal effort to get started with the Macroblock MBI5030 PWM LED driver. Comes with onboard LEDs, but can still drive external ones. All pins broken out. Only needs a microcontroller and a high-frequency grayscale clock. An AVR running at 16MHz can use its CLOCK-OUT pin for the latter. The chips 'speaks' an SPI-like protocol. Unfortunately some information is encoded in the timing of the LE input, so one cannot use fast hardware SPI for the hole transfer. The special sequences must be bit-banged. Nevertheless it is a rather affordable chip and does mostly what it should. There is an issue with the datasheet(s) that can be found on the web. The older ones document functions that definitely are not implemented in the current silicon.

Fed up with wiring up LEDs just for debugging code. Now it's just 'plug-n-play'. Shipping of the boards took 4 weeks again ;-( A few theories: 1) Mailing in December simply sucks 2) Someone at the customs office hates me 3) New regulations to pester people by delaying shipments 4) Extensive scanning of mail for illegal / hazardous substances 5) Some sort of conspiracy against purple PC-boards 6) All of the above A simple Arduino-library for the MBI5030 can be found on github .

I won the fight against this MBI5030 PWM LED driver. It turned out that the datasheet I got from the distributor's website is "preliminary". I was trying to use stuff that simply isn't in the final silicon (like parity check for example). Still some functions don't work (like auto-shutoff if the PWM clock is missing). Oh well... The resulting Arduino-ized code may be found here .

I won the fight against this MBI5030 PWM LED driver. It turned out that the datasheet I got from the distributor's website is "preliminary". I was trying to use stuff that simply isn't in the final silicon (like parity check for example). Still some functions don't work (like auto-shutoff if the PWM clock is missing). Oh well... The resulting Arduino-ized code may be found here .