introArduino Based Meter - a many LED Driver
As the direct result of a question in the Instructables forum, for a bargraph to display data on the dashboard of a car, a custom electronics instructable.
Here, for your delectation is the Car-barDuino, a simple display system for analog and digital stuff, for a car, for a timer, for a thermometer, for whatever. I built it for a manifold pressure meter for friends car, I'm going to use it at work for some monitors in a research instrument.
Under the hood, it uses a micro configured to run "Arduino" sketches, so anyone can play with the code. All the spare I/O has been brought out to connectors to play with.
Enjoy and employ.
Here, for your delectation is the Car-barDuino, a simple display system for analog and digital stuff, for a car, for a timer, for a thermometer, for whatever. I built it for a manifold pressure meter for friends car, I'm going to use it at work for some monitors in a research instrument.
Under the hood, it uses a micro configured to run "Arduino" sketches, so anyone can play with the code. All the spare I/O has been brought out to connectors to play with.
Enjoy and employ.
step 1What it can (and can't) do
In its current form, we can drive 2, 7 segment displays and a 30 element bargraph. We can mix LEDs from red/green/yellow, but it can't drive white or blue. If there was enough interest, I'd redo the design to allow higher voltage LED technology to be used. The current design is open ended, since each MAX7221 can be connected to the next over just 5 wires, and each can drive 64 LEDs at once.
There are 15 levels of digital control of LED brightness, and a SINGLE resistor to set the maximum brightness of all of the LEDs on one chip.
The processor can be any standard Arduino (Atmega 168 or 328) and with the ICSP connector, you can burn your own bootloaders.
The input interface uses a simple current limiting resistor and two diode clamps to the 5V rail. DON'T make a habit of driving into the clamps !
There are no input scaling resistors on the circuit at the moment.
There are 15 levels of digital control of LED brightness, and a SINGLE resistor to set the maximum brightness of all of the LEDs on one chip.
The processor can be any standard Arduino (Atmega 168 or 328) and with the ICSP connector, you can burn your own bootloaders.
The input interface uses a simple current limiting resistor and two diode clamps to the 5V rail. DON'T make a habit of driving into the clamps !
There are no input scaling resistors on the circuit at the moment.
step 2How it works
Here are the schematics. At the right hand end, Its a generalised, basic ATmega 168 or 328 layout, with the FTDI interface cable for serial connection to the outside world, and the ICSP connector for fast programming and/or bootloader installation. The LEDs are driven by a Max 7221 or Max 7219 (datasheet)
There are currently only two analog inputs wired, and they have diode clamps to the 5V supply rails.
The unit is designed to run off a 12V supply, there is an on-board 5V regulator that barely gets warm at all in use.
Car-barduino.pdf(431x164) 152 KBcar bar schematic.pdf(1040x807) 77 KBstep 3Building one
I designed the PCB by hand, but the PCB was made professionally. I like putting big ground planes on my boards, since it kills noise dead at the source, but it makes the board hard to make well at home. Its also seriously double sided and plated through. Whereever ground connections are made to ICs, the connection is direct to the ground plane. There are also several capacitors, which again reduce noise, so don't omit them. I am sure Maxim must have had a neat layout planned when they designed the 7221 , but I'll be damned if I can see it yet. I gave up on my auto-router too - the tracking looked nasty.
The Bill of Materials shows what you need. Suggested sources ? In the UK, Rapid, RS and Farnell have everything. Farnell is Newark in the USA.
Assembly has been made deliberately easy, since Chris, who suggested it (Hi Chris !!) hasn't got access to surface mount assembly, and should present no problems at all to anyone with decent soldering skills. There are a couple of simple SM capacitors to fit, and a resistor, which should be fitted before the Arduino !!
If anyone is interested, I have some spare PCBs that I can sell on - it turned out to be as cheap to make 5 as 1 ! Go figure. The board has a couple of very minor screwups that I'll fix if I make more of 'em, but the lucky first buyers get to fix their own.
The Bill of Materials shows what you need. Suggested sources ? In the UK, Rapid, RS and Farnell have everything. Farnell is Newark in the USA.
Assembly has been made deliberately easy, since Chris, who suggested it (Hi Chris !!) hasn't got access to surface mount assembly, and should present no problems at all to anyone with decent soldering skills. There are a couple of simple SM capacitors to fit, and a resistor, which should be fitted before the Arduino !!
If anyone is interested, I have some spare PCBs that I can sell on - it turned out to be as cheap to make 5 as 1 ! Go figure. The board has a couple of very minor screwups that I'll fix if I make more of 'em, but the lucky first buyers get to fix their own.
step 4Using it
The coding is pretty simple. I integrated the whole thing using the excellent LEDcontrol library in Arduino, and it worked off the shelf.
You need to look at my "ledSetup" command to allocate the right pins to the MAX7221, and I also made things better by limiting the scanregister to 4.
Take a look at my pin mapping functions in "BarGraph" I can do dots, and bars. A bit more work, probably with the mapping function and you could do some really neat animations.
The source includes a digital filter called an "exponential forgetter" or first order low-pass filter. Its designed around binary math as far as possible, for high speed operation using shifts and not explicit multiply operations.
The input (0.1024) digits is scaled to 0..30 digits currently: there's no reason not to scale it 0.99 for the 7 segs, and scale it 0..30 for the bar.
I've got several little projects lined up, a VU meter is pretty obvious - the next gen board'll squeeze in two rows of bar, probably only 20 bits per row !
Design requests.
A couple of folks have asked about adding OBD-II interfaces to the thing. I am looking at suitable interfaces for it at the moment - there are three different standard interfaces !!
What I WILL be doing on my next boards is two rows of 20 bars + 4 digits, 2 on each line. Optionally, you can have just 30 bars on each line.
Projects
Here's a (future) list of other projects running on the same hardware. If you've got a project you've done using it, let me know in the comments and I'll add a link here:
You need to look at my "ledSetup" command to allocate the right pins to the MAX7221, and I also made things better by limiting the scanregister to 4.
Take a look at my pin mapping functions in "BarGraph" I can do dots, and bars. A bit more work, probably with the mapping function and you could do some really neat animations.
The source includes a digital filter called an "exponential forgetter" or first order low-pass filter. Its designed around binary math as far as possible, for high speed operation using shifts and not explicit multiply operations.
The input (0.1024) digits is scaled to 0..30 digits currently: there's no reason not to scale it 0.99 for the 7 segs, and scale it 0..30 for the bar.
I've got several little projects lined up, a VU meter is pretty obvious - the next gen board'll squeeze in two rows of bar, probably only 20 bits per row !
Design requests.
A couple of folks have asked about adding OBD-II interfaces to the thing. I am looking at suitable interfaces for it at the moment - there are three different standard interfaces !!
What I WILL be doing on my next boards is two rows of 20 bars + 4 digits, 2 on each line. Optionally, you can have just 30 bars on each line.
Projects
Here's a (future) list of other projects running on the same hardware. If you've got a project you've done using it, let me know in the comments and I'll add a link here:
- VU meter, coming soon
- Reaction timer
- Bath thermometer
- Kitchen timer
- TDS/EC meter
- Moisture meter
- Vacuum/Boost Gauge (gage !) by skullmaster20
MAPP.pde2 KB
