8×8 LED matrix as secondary display

… AKA Part IV 🙂

It is easy to stack up to 8 MAXIM MAX7219 ICs using the same 3 control lines. Natural idea would be to join 8 pieces of 8digits/7segmment displays (to get 64 digits – who needs 64 digits anyway?) or for instance 8 pieces of 8×8 LED matrices, obtaining 64×8, or may be 32×16, large matrix. I did something in between, stacking one 8digits display with one 8×8 matrix. On the matrix I decided to show rotating bar, to visualize passing seconds.

8digit_8x8

The most of the code, including libraries, and usage of interrupts was explained earlier in Parts III, II and I. The new element here is a second device, which we have to initialize in setup() procedure. Of course, also creating control object, we have to inform library, that 2 units were stacked up. As for programming side, there is 2D array (somehow not too often met in simple examples of arduino code).

See how it runs on YouTube

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DS3231 MAX7219 interrupts

… also known as DS3231 part III. (Have you seen Part I and Part II ?)

zegar1

It is pretty natural to start playing with interrupts as we write program for the clock. There are 3 (in UNO, other boards have different number) internal timer based interrupts. Timer0 and Timer2 are based on 8 bits counters, so I decided to use Timer1 here with 16 bits. The prescaler set to 64 and match register to 2499 did the trick (one could use as well 256;624 or 8;19999 pairs for Timer1 looking for 100Hz refresh).

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