Moving Message Display - From the Grinch

[ptyzzer]

When I was finding information about the grinch controller I realised it was doing the same thing as a moving message display would do, shifting data bits and enabling the output. So I decided to build one using 5 of the MBI5027 IC's per row of LED's and used 7 rows of LED's so that characters can be displayed using the common standard of a 5 x 7 matrix of LED's per character. The Moving Message display can be driven direct from any of the switching controllers found on this forum but it does use 8 of your valuable channels to do it, 7 for data and 1 for the clock. Each of the characters, numbers or symbols are programmed directly in to the vixen grid so making it very versatile as to what you display. I use it for displaying the radio frequency to tune to, song title and my website address. A little more information including some pictures and aVixen screen snap can be found on my website tyzzerslights.org.uk/Display2011.htm

[budude]

It sounds like you've reinvented the LEDTriks - it uses essentially the same process (and chip!) neat that it can be driven directly within the sequence!

[ptyzzer]

I thought the LEDtriks display would be far more complicated than this as I think I have seen it do all sorts of display capabilities like rotating, up/down scroling etc. I was trying to build something easy to program, may be I need to re-read up on the LEDtricks info.

[mattrob]

Your way of programming the LED matrix using the Vixen grid is quite clever!

While the circuitry of the ledtriks may be a little more complicated, programming it with the Vixen plugin that automatically generates sequences with a font is pretty convenient.