TileDriver

TileDriver is a board to drive HUB75 type RGB matrix panels from an SPI bus. It contains a framebuffer and interface circuitry to allow slower CPUs like an AVR or PIC to drive the displays.

Project Status

• 2015-10-03: Build a breakout board for the tile connection to enable hooking a logic analyzer up to all the signals. Got SPI-to-tile working for a full display! Using the internal EBR in the CPLD right now, still need to fix up a lot of messy code and get the framebuffer into the external SDRAM, but it's getting there.
• 2015-09-26: Got the first 3 bytes of RAM used to set the colour of the whole screen, which is a start.
• 2015-09-19: Got the BCM working so each colour can now be set to any brightness via the DIP switches.
• 2015-09-18: Got the basic hardware assembled on the MachXO dev board (connector for tile, 3x3 DIP switches to set colours for testing). Screen is successfully being driven with a single hardcoded colour over the whole display.
• 2015-09-16: Received 32x32 video tile and MachXO dev board to prototype this.
• 2015-09: Started putting idea together to use in the future BRCRD Scoreboard project.

Overview

• 640x640x24bpp max display size
• Main data input via SPI at up to 50MHz
  • 256x256x24bpp can update at 30fps
  • 640x640x24bpp can update at 5fps, still fine for static data displays

Gallery

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  First light from the TileDriver code on the dev board.

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  First successfull BCM-based dimming.

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  First half image display.

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  First full image display.