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Yona-Appletree / LEDscape

Beagle Bone Black cape and firmware for driving a large number of WS281x LED strips.
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Allegro A6281 Support #20

Open MarkKropf opened 9 years ago

MarkKropf commented 9 years ago

I've been working with macetech's octobar's for a couple years and have been searching for a replacement for my software bitbanging for a while. Would adding support for the A6281 be a good fit for the project?

I'd love to get some of my lantern displays using LEDscape image

Yona-Appletree commented 8 years ago

Sorry for not responding to this for so long, but I think you certainly could write support for the A6281. After a quick read of the data sheet, it appears to be a fairly straightforward SPI-based 10-bit color driver with a separate latch pin. A basic implementation that only used 8 bit color would be pretty easy. You could use one of the 24 channels per PRU for the latch pin, or you could use one of the unused pins, depending on your hardware.

Adding full support for 10-bit color would be harder, and is something I've been considering adding to allow for other non-8-bit chips as well. LEDscape internally uses 16-bit color, so it wouldn't be too hard to expose that to the PRUs, but it would take significantly more work than adding 8-bit support.