I'm Building the Best LED Wall on the Internet

I'm on a mission to create the best open source LED wall on the internet and this led tile is the next step towards that goal what's up guys I'm Chris and today we're going to be building a brand new LED wall now I absolutely love this wall behind me I use it all the time but it is far from perfect the LED strips that I used for it although they were really cheap and cost effective for covering such a large area I don't like how big the pixels are it makes it really hard to tell what's actually on the screen when you're in the room standing just a couple feet away from it so let's talk about the new design and what's going to make it better than this instead of using LED strips I'm going to be using these led tiles now these are a little bit more expensive than the strips but in terms of the actual pixel count the number of pixels and the pixel density these are actually in insane value and if you buy them in bulk you can actually get them for about $5 a piece I was able to buy a hundred of these for about $500 so I'm going to break this project up into three main parts it's going to be the hardware design I'm going to be designing my own PCB for this project for the first time I've never done it before but I am cautiously optimistic I think I'll be able to do it no problem part two is going to be designing a 3D printed tile that anybody can duplicate and all the pieces will just snap together to make the assembly a breeze and part three is going to be the software design I want the software to be scalable and modular so you can build any size wall that you want to and the code will still work and of course course I'm going to make all of the code op source so anybody at home can make their own changes if you want to and hopefully add features that I don't have the time to add myself this portion of the video is sponsored by jlc PCB they made the entire PCB manufacturing and design process so streamlined that I genuinely think that anyone can do it more on them in a second let's see how I designed my very first circuit board the brains of my board will be the ESP 32 S3 mini system on a module this means I won't need to buy any Ram or eom because that's already included in the package I'll be adding a USBC port a 3.3 volt linear regulator two buttons for boot mode and reset and a low pass filter for the chip enable pin all of this comes from the esp32 data sheet I'll also be adding some pads to connect the LEDs and power supply some pins for the rest of the gpio in case I want to add features later as well as a switch to toggle between USB and Supply Power finally I'm going to add some 3.3 mm headphone Jacks to the uart and spy pins of the microcontroller this will allow me to Daisy chain the boards together with cheap cables and still get reliable communication between them this web-based circuit design tool is directly linked to jlc pcb's Parts Library so it makes component selection a breed once my schematic is done I can just click convert schematic to PCB and after a second of loading all of my parts are right here ready to be put onto my board now I know I'm going to get some hate for this in the comments but I just use auto route here to Route all the components together I could not be bothered to do all of this connecting myself and it actually did work perfectly for me so once I was happy with the way everything looked all I had to do was go to fabrication and click oneclick order PCB smt and just click yes here and it'll check all the design rules boom and then quantity I did 20 PCB color I chose black just cuz I like the way it looks and oneclick order will take you directly to jlc's website once I was happy with the way everything looked all I had to do was click oneclick order PCB smt it took me less than a day to go from a crude sketch to placing an order since the whole process is so streamlined I did have to manually select a few parts that were out of stock and jlc support was really helpful when I accidentally picked a part that didn't match the PCB a few moments later even though I ordered pick and place Parts my order was still delivered within the week and these boards came out amazing if you're working on a project that needs a PCB or if you want to recreate this one be sure to check out jlc PCB using the links in the description while I was waiting for the pcbs to get deleted Ed I threw together a modular Tile Design to make assembly of Breeze I started by taking measurements of the tile and drawing a grid that matches the LED spacing I'm going to be printing this at a 0.2 mm layer height so I added a one layer thick base to diffuse the LED lights at the bottom here and then I added some holes here these round holes will allow me to run cables between them and then these triangle holes are triangles because they'll print nicely without any support material but I'm going to add a support beam that goes across here to hold the LED tile in place and then I have these rectangular notches on the sides here that are going to allow me to clip the tiles together here's that crossbar I just mentioned it'll hold the LED tile in place you can see it has triangles here that'll fit into those triangle holes and then I added some small notches here that align with the holes in the PCB so the PCB can just snap into place without any screws and finally here's just a little tiny clip I'm going to print a bunch of these to clip the tiles together jlc does 3D printed Parts as well so my original plan was to order 96 of these tiles to build the whole wall from them but it was going to be about $800 so I decided I had better print them myself the design came out great and everything just snaps together the only thing that didn't work great are these tabs I added for the PCB they align with the holes but they are just a little too brittle and end up just snapping right off so I'll have to address that later but oh well and since the tiles come with connectors pre-attached it was super easy to plug everything to together and there we have it one fully assembled LED tile so now that the panel is ready I started testing the firmware and I found out the Hardway that my spy headphone Jacks do not work because I have shorted together in the schematic the clock and data lines so that's useless but the UR still works so we're going to continue this project testing those out instead so this is the point in the project where everything started to go horribly wrong I'm using a program called LMC shd that takes a gif image or even a screencast capture of my PC and converts it into a pixel array you can see it working on my LED wall up here and also on a single tile of my new LED panel the problem is LMC shd translates the picture into these scan lines and in order to fill out this Matrix tile here I need to convert that from these lines into separate tiles that uh each break up the data individually which is very difficult to do and I honestly spent weeks trying to Sol this problem and I could not come up with an algorithm to do it effectively so we're going to fast forward to when I figured out how to use the neomatrix library for Arduino because that ended up solving all of these problems the neomatrix library allows me to define a tiled Matrix just like this and if I flash the example code you can see um well it's it's not quite right I think what's happening is these tiles are flipped I just noticed here in the documentation that the start needs to be in this bottom corner for these two when it's in the top corner for all the other ones so um I'll see if I can flip that around and just like that we are in business going to have to make a few modifications to turn on these last two tiles over here but all the processing is being done on board and I don't have to write any code other than those two lines so I modified the example code and I have my nion cat running here but seeing a bit of a color issue here and it's not just the one example my Batman is blue for some reason blue and orange and it should be black and gray so yeah still got some work to do but I will report back all right welcome back guys I have gotten it working the problem took me a few days to figure out but it ended up being pretty straightforward the LMC shd software breaks our pixel data into rgb565 which means there are five bits for red six bits for green and five bits for blue now this comes out into two bytes eight bits and eight bits and what was happening was the order that I was sending the bytes from the software to the display was actually backwards from how the draw function wanted that data to be sent so I was actually sending green blue red and then the last little bit of the green here but the software was interpreting this little bit of green and blue as red then some of blue and red as green and then some of red and green as the blue value so in the firmware what I ended up doing was I receive this data I swap those two bits and then I move on and I get the the rest of the data I do that for every 16bit pair of bytes and the result is that my colors on my display actually match the colors from the software so let's take a closer look overall I am really happy with how this tile turned out I think the colors and the contrast look amazing especially with the black diffuser as opposed to the white diffuser on my current wall design in the next design I'm going to have to get rid of the uh diffuser layer 3D print though because it just takes way too long to print I'm thinking I might try and use some of this car window tint because you can see it lets some light through but it's still black so it'll give that level of contrast I'm also going to try and get rid of these grid lines where the tiles connect to get a more seamless final design I'm going to have to make some changes to the software as well because although the neomatrix library is great for this small Matrix once I have all 96 of these tiles it's not going to be able to do all the processing on the microcontroller I'm going to have to break up the video into separate tiles in software on the Windows side so if you're excited to see those changes be sure to get subscribed below this led wall here or this led tile I should say has the same number of pixels as my entire wall currently has so the new LED wall is going to have 16 times the total pixels as my current design so if you're excited to see how that turns out subscribe leave a comment down below and I'm excited to see you guys in the next video [Music]

Channel: Tech Random

Views: 40,899

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Id: 7F7HgCJp4Gk

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024