Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix controlled by BeagleBone Black

RE: Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix controlled by BeagleBone Black

Former Member — Sun, 25 May 2014 08:02:42 GMT

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 ?

RE: Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix controlled by BeagleBone Black

Instructorman — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 21:37:33 GMT

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

RE: Adafruit 8x8 LED matrix controlled by BeagleBone Black

DAB — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 20:34:46 GMT

Hi Drew,

Nice demo.

I was wondering when someone would begin mixing and matching Shields, Capes and what ever between various MCU devices.

Almost all of them support the basic interface requirement.

All you need to do is build an interface cable to match up the pins and then modify the software accordingly.

DAB