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hzeller / rpi-rgb-led-matrix

Controlling up to three chains of 64x64, 32x32, 16x32 or similar RGB LED displays using Raspberry Pi GPIO
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Pi 3 Compute Module #285

Open andygrace opened 7 years ago

andygrace commented 7 years ago

Been lurking for a long while now but want to introduce myself and thank Henner for so much work in this and dealing with some high end, but also some pretty low end comments.

This is more of a survey than anything else. I've used the library quite a bit recently and it's working great. I especially like the transformations and the virtual canvas.

I've been knocking around an idea in my head to use the new Pi 3 Compute module and see if we can push quite a significant number of chains out the extra GPIOs, rather than just the single chain on Adafruit or three in parallel via the nice little OshPark buffer board Henner has designed and donated to the community.

If I strip back almost everything in a distro to more or less the kernel, GPIO and networking primitives, then allocate maybe 16 parallel chains, I'm wondering how far we can push this thing. I'm even prepared to look at the sparsely documented VPUs in the VideoCore GPU to accelerate some of the basic maths routines.

It'd be a pretty big side project - does anyone think it's worth it?

Cheers Andy

hzeller commented 7 years ago

I have thought about that and it is on my TODO list.

I've briefly looked into it and with the additional available GPIOs, you get about two more chains I think (maybe three) (Also I have another idea to maybe double that.) But 16 parallel chains won't be possible with the available pins.

GPU won't help much for pushing out data, but it might be possible to use to generate pixel-data.

So yeah, it is on the TODO list, whenever some free weekend permits.