PCB Design: An LED Matrix controller board

This video is 16x speed of a capture I took while I was designing a PCB to more easily control an LED matrix. The board I designed is to drive a bicolor 8x8 LED matrix display, it uses a CPLD to accept commands and drive the LEDs (driving common rows through FETs in order to be able to supply enough current).

I use Cadsoft Eagle for PCB design; In this video most of the components I required already existed in my library so most of the time here is spent on actual design.
In my process, I first generate a schematic, connect everything that I'm sure about - Secondly I roughly lay out the board and try to work out how best to connect any pins that don't have a specific connection requirement (like on CPLDs, FPGAs, and microcontrollers where one of several pins would work for the connections) - By optimizing the connections you can produce a much cleaner-looking board that has less need to jump between layers at lot to create the required connections.
After deciding how to connect it, I wire up the connections in the schematic and get to routing, I may have to jump back and change some of my connection decisions depending on how it goes. At the end here I wind up with a pretty clean board that has all of the connections I need :) After I created the video, I did also go back and expand the power traces, add a bypass capacitor which I had forgotten, and cleaned up a few other things, but this video shows the majority of the work that went into this PCB.

I'm making this video available in case anyone is interested in seeing how this sort of thing works, I'd love to hear feedback though, on what's interesting and what isn't.

I have a blog post that goes into some more detail here:
http://blog.akkit.org/2010/05/23/8x8-led-matrix-controller/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• PCB
• PCB Design
• Eagle
• Layout
• Circuit board
• Electronics

[Timhen81]

Tnx , im thinking about making a LED matris but i dont know the basic of what to start , seems kinda hard i must say , i would be nice to know were to begin , i can by the parts but idont know if there is of any use now when i saw that it seems like u need a loot mor know how than high school edu...

[sgstair]

@Timhen81 Electronics does takes some special domain knowledge to do well, and without a place to start it definitely appears to be unapproachable - but it's not as hard as it looks. I suggest finding a hardcopy/electronic copy of "The Art of Electronics", it moves pretty quickly but pretty solidly covers the important concepts for circuit design.

Also, I have a blog post on this specific project that goes into a bit more detail - I added a link to the video description.

Good luck :)

[angeldiazg]

Is it working? Could you share the PCB design? I use EAGLE too and I would like to design an stackable 8x8 bicolor module for arduino.

Thank you.

[twis00]

yeah what software u are using my friend... ive used qurtus ... multisim, pspice, but i dont recall this soft!

thanks

[uabuntsu]

which software did he use? Cadence?

[LasVegasole]

I like your video a lot!