BlinkieBits

BlinkieBits will be a series of small boards with microcontrollers on some (Processor Boards), LEDs on others (Display Boards), and I/O capabilities on others (Interface Boards). The boards will interconnect to make blinkies, and will talk to each other to make larger blinkie displays.

Topology

Current idea is to have a 'base layer' of interface board(s) and processor board(s), and then a layer on top of display boards. Each display board would plug into one (or more?) processor board using standard connections so that any display board could plug into any processor board (channel requirements notwithstanding).

Interface Board Ideas

• USB
• RS232
• Ethernet
• SPI/I2C/TWI/1Wire

Processor Board Ideas

• Umm... processors and stuff.

Display Board Ideas

All ideas based on 12 channels per display board, as a random example.

• 1x16 Single-Color
• 1x5 RGB
• 4x4 Single-Color

Architecture/Project Ideas

• Standard number of channels per display/processor board, or variable?
  • If variable, could two 12-channel processor boards (for example) connect to one 24-channel-requiring display board?
  • Variable likely makes more sense, as no one processor board is going to cover the space from a big 2D RGB array to a small contact sphere, and having to connect 50 tiny processor boards together isn't a good solution.
• Would boards interconnect in 1d space only, or also in 2d space?
• Could boards program each other like the IXM boards can?
  • No reason not, if the MCUs supported self-programming and a standard bootloader was used. Very small MCUs likely won't support the former though, so a hack would need to be done with extra pins to program each other.
• Display boards could have a tiny EEPROM (think SPD on DIMMs) to identify to the processor board what model of display board/what LEDs are on it.
• Interface protocol can hopefully be single-wire, to maximize I/O pin usage on small MCUs.
  • Could get complex with a single I/O pin communicating in a 2d matrix of modules.
• Some display boards could include latching muxes, which would mean they were non-PWMable but could have a large number of LEDs on them.