Single Multisegment Display

May 24th, 2015

Wiring up the MAX6954 I discovered the MAX6954 4-Wire Interfaced, 2.7V to 5.5V LED Display Driver with I/O Expander and Key Scan which I’ll call the MAX6954 from now on. This chip allows me to drive up to 8 16-segment LEDs using one chip and a minimum of discrete parts.... (more...)

Power Supply and a Pivot

April 25th, 2015

Finishing the Power Regulated Power Supply I finished up the Adjustable breadboard power supply kit - v1.0 by following their excellent directions. One word of warning though. The power supply kit generates two different voltages on the two sets of output pins. The left side is the selected voltage range... (more...)

Five Volt Interlude

April 24th, 2015

A 5V Interlude The next phase of my project is to get a working multisegment display. I’d like to hook up several of my multisegment LEDs but before I do that I have to get more power since the Raspberry Pi doesn’t supply much current out its pins. I’ve decided... (more...)

Driving the MAX6957

February 21st, 2015

Writing to the SPI Interface The SPI interface is working on the Raspberry Pi and so I’m getting ready to send some information to the 4-Wire-Intefaced 20-Port LED Display Driver and I/O Expander (MAX6957), called the 6957 from now on. The issue that is mentioned from the data sheet is... (more...)

Investigating the SPI driver

February 13th, 2015

We left off with the hardware being hooked up but no software to run our project. I wanted to test the SPI hardware and the best way to do so is with a loopback test. After using my favorite search engine I found a post called SPI-Python: Hardware SPI for... (more...)