fds-185

Bring a surplus FDS-185 LED matrix back to life with your own firmware. After desoldering the Lattice PLD, an ESP32-S2 (or a plain ATmega328P) drives the panel over SPI and runs Game of Life on it.

What's in it

• ESP32-S2 firmware (PlatformIO) with Game of Life plus WiFi and OTA.
• ATmega328P test code (Atmel Studio).
• A 3D-printed stand.
• A pixel-mapping spreadsheet.

The refresh loop

A timer interrupts and hands off to a shift task. The task SPI-transfers one row slice at 5 MHz, selects the row via RSA/B/C and the U3/U6 chip selects, strobes it, then moves to the next. The ESP32 multiplexes all 16 rows to build each frame. There is some jitter; the SPI timing is not perfectly even. Good enough for now.