Alternatively, (I would have to learn CAD I think) I could design up a PCB circuit with shift registers and LEDs and pay some company in China to print & solder our components to it.
Brian has also offered to just buy the $350 Scrolling LED Message unit from Sam's Club / online and reimburse him if we open up the thing and it's something we can work with. The intent would be to mod it out: use our own controller, add on wireless or interface with the IR somehow.
The strips seem like a pain, but I like the idea of using pre-made grids! I hadn't thought of these. The ones I looked at on your site were all pretty small (like an inch), but there are a few on this site that are two inches tall or more for an 8x8 grid (no price easily available?). And Sparkfun has these two color ones for $7 each, though that's a bit expensive (seems like we'd be spending at least $70).
We could use normal ribbon cable or whatever to wire these up to a PCB made on veroboard (or even to a breadboard) using the circuit design I was talking about earlier.
As for designing a PCB... I still don't think using veroboard is out. We just have to wire the grounds of each column together (not on the board). But really, the grids may be the way to go...
For the lounge? Sure. I totally think this would be cooler than a camera to spy on us all the time in the lounge.
The real meat of the project is the big LED sign, of course. Do we really want to build that? We could, but it seems like a lot of work and probably not cheap. From that project, it says he found a junked one. If we ever see a junked one for $10, I'm all for buying it!
I figure we could probably construct 8x8 LED units that use a matrix... one shift register drives the rows, the other grounds the columns. We could build these on veroboard or something. We could tie together multiple of the 8x8 units to get more columns -- and these could share the column-grounding shift register. That is, each 8x8 unit has its own shift register and all units share one more shift register. We cycle through driving each of the 8 columns in a unit, so they're each turned on an eighth of the time. If we want to try this, I suggest we try building one 8x8 unit and see how much work it is, how long it takes to build, and if we like how fast it is, etc.
Great Write-up on SparkFun!
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorial_info.php?tutorials_id=91
Some Resources
(from lowest level to highest level):
Food for thought!
The strips seem like a pain, but...
The strips seem like a pain, but I like the idea of using pre-made grids! I hadn't thought of these. The ones I looked at on your site were all pretty small (like an inch), but there are a few on this site that are two inches tall or more for an 8x8 grid (no price easily available?). And Sparkfun has these two color ones for $7 each, though that's a bit expensive (seems like we'd be spending at least $70).
We could use normal ribbon cable or whatever to wire these up to a PCB made on veroboard (or even to a breadboard) using the circuit design I was talking about earlier.
As for designing a PCB... I still don't think using veroboard is out. We just have to wire the grounds of each column together (not on the board). But really, the grids may be the way to go...
Sure
For the lounge? Sure. I totally think this would be cooler than a camera to spy on us all the time in the lounge.
The real meat of the project is the big LED sign, of course. Do we really want to build that? We could, but it seems like a lot of work and probably not cheap. From that project, it says he found a junked one. If we ever see a junked one for $10, I'm all for buying it!
I figure we could probably construct 8x8 LED units that use a matrix... one shift register drives the rows, the other grounds the columns. We could build these on veroboard or something. We could tie together multiple of the 8x8 units to get more columns -- and these could share the column-grounding shift register. That is, each 8x8 unit has its own shift register and all units share one more shift register. We cycle through driving each of the 8 columns in a unit, so they're each turned on an eighth of the time. If we want to try this, I suggest we try building one 8x8 unit and see how much work it is, how long it takes to build, and if we like how fast it is, etc.