Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix controlled by BeagleBone Black

22 Nov 2013

Similar to my previous post on Interfacing BeagleBone Black with Adafruit 7-segment LED display, I have hooked up the Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix with I2C "backpack" . This means the matrix is connected with just 4 wires (3.3VDC, GND, SDA, SCL) to the BeagleBone Black (e.g. BBB) which is mounted on the Adafruit BeagleBone Black Proto Plate :

And like with the 7-segment LED "backpack", the Python module that Adafruit wrote for the Raspberry Pi works with the BeagleBone Black as well (hooray for the common abstraction of Linux and Python ):

https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Raspberry-Pi-Python-Code/blob/master/Adafruit_LEDBackpack/Adafruit_8x8.py

I shot a video of it running the Adafruit_8x8.py example program:

Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix controlled by BeagleBone - YouTube

I'm looking forward to putting this display to use in a project.

Cheers,

Drew

http://twitter.com/pdp7

Former Member over 11 years ago in reply to Former Member

It could be that the Adafruit BBIO library has not installed correctly
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Former Member over 11 years ago

Weird, the installation on the BBB (revB) from anofficial Debian image won't get it working :

while
python -c "import Adafruit_BBIO.GPIO as GPIO; print GPIO"
is ok, any script is ending with :

from Adafruit_8x8 import ColorEightByEight

ImportError: No module named Adafruit_8x8

is it only working on Angstrom ?
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fustini over 11 years ago in reply to Instructorman

Yup, this is just a small device so i2c works fine. But the BBB is awesome at driving huge LED display. It's two 200MHz microcontrollers (Programmable Real-Time Units e.g. PRU) can handle refreshing a RGB LED panel without using the ARM CPU resources. Check out this project:

Octoscroller (LED panel):
http://beagleboard.org/blog/2013-10-22-project-spotlight-octoscroller/
http://beagleboard.org/blog/2013-10-15-project-spotlight-disorient-pyramid/
http://www.nycresistor.com/2013/09/12/octoscroller/

Blinkiverse (LED strip):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0haLkuLknLY

LEDScrape (LED strip):
http://www.nycresistor.com/2013/07/27/ledscape/

Paul of Teensy and DortBot PDX used BBB to control LED strips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Vbtg_6yRg
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Instructorman over 11 years ago

Drew,

I purchased a Beaglebone black with the intent of using it to drive LED strings based on the WS2811 RGB device. I still want to do this, but the temptation to use a PIC was too strong (The Microchip PIC is my go-to device family for most embedded control problems). So far I have been successful in getting a PIC18F4520 to drive the strings and produce interesting light patterns - well, interesting to me and my cat.

Since you have demonstrated ability to get the Beaglebone to drive an LED matrix with I2C, I'm wondering if you have any advice on how to approach generating high speed pulse trains with the Beagelbone. I need to generate at least 5760 pulses in rapid succession with no more than a few microseconds of delay between each 8-bit byte. I'm pretty sure the Beaglebone can do this, but I don't have any experience with its development environment and am wondering where to concetrate my efforts.

Mark
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fustini over 11 years ago in reply to DAB

I really like it when modules use standard interfaces like SPI or i2c. I also like how Adafruit has developed Python GPIO library (PyBBIO) to act the same as the Pi GPIO library (RPi.GPIO) so that their Raspberry Pi Python examples work accross both. And for I2C, Pi and BBB use the same Python module smbus.
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