Kristian Hentschel

Almost two years ago now I started planning and building a custom LED matrix to be controlled by my Arduino Duemilanove which sports an ATMega328 microprocessor. I used four Max7221 chips that I knew from a previous project and daisy-chained them to control the four 8×8 sections of my 16×16 matrix.

Arduino is an awesome rapid development and prototyping platform for learning to use and appreciate microcontrollers. Their boards contain a USB controller for power supply and programming from a PC, some status LEDs and pin sockets for interfacing to external hardware, all at a very affordable price. They have recently moved to the Arduino Uno (different USB controller, but still based on the ATMega 328) and version 1.0 of the software. Once I package my code as a library I’ll also check that it’s compatible with the new version.
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The year is coming to a close and I’ve yet to make good on one of my new year’s resolutions: To finally do something to my website to free it from the limbo that is the eternal “coming soon” page that existed since I bought my domain name.

I often thought, “Hey, I should write that down” or “Hey, I could put this on my website”, and I experimented with quite a few more or less complicated, more or less home grown approaches to a website but never got around to something I could just use. I’ve been convinced to trust in the plugin-enhanced out-of-the-box power of WordPress after I hacked together the new Glasgow University Student Television website this summer. So, in stark contrast to what I did there, this shall be a simple way for me to publish content, without so much hacking, for now. So yes, once again I’ve joined yet another “Dark Side” (After Twitter, Facebook, et al) and set up yet another WordPress blog.

Now I hope I’ve finally arrived at a solution that I can just use. Maybe that will help in bringing me to actually use it, but I don’t promise anything.

Let’s go.

Kristian Hentschel

Arduino controlled 16 x 16 LED Matrix

Hello world!