.:madworm:.'s photos with the keyword: macroblock

Not tested yet...

Very little solder paste for the resistor packs.

Place the chip.

Add paste flux for the chip. A flux pen may work as well, but paste seems to work better. It lasts longer.

More paste.

I had a fundraiser for this one on tindie. In hindsight I have to be very very glad that nobody wanted it and that it didn't succeed. It would have taken me aeons to assemble the boards ;-( The only sensible way of having this board made is with a pick-and-place machine. It would be orders of magnitude more pleasant without the LEDs + resistors, but having them on the board was the whole point of this project.

Inspect.

Some more LEDs.

Of course you may also use solder paste.

The hardest parts are done.

Place one bead of solder.

Testing... testing... is this thing on?

Place the LEDs.

Repeat.

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.

Inspect.