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RGB LED RING V2


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By: madworm

I've updated an old design of an 8-RGB-LED ring with dedicated constant current LED drivers and better firmware implementing Binary Code Modulation (BCM), which provides 6-bit depth per color and low cpu utilization and individual control of the LEDs with double buffering. Oh, and it's darn bright!

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Files

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Bill of Materials

Qty Part # Description Schematic ID Source
1 B3c01ca8ef2042863ec8f9752491017ee744f9e5 ATMEGA168-20AU 8BIT 16K FLASH MCU, TQFP32, 168 Source
3 1742e76375cdc5609b3feedfd8bbd6fff20d980a STP08CP05MTR STP08CP05 Series 100mA 30 MHz Low Voltage Low Current Power 8-bit Shift Register Source
3 896f6319d1aceda8e49ad1617f5993a44dffdc59 TC33X-2-202E TRIMMER, 2K, 3MM Source
3 0f8ae5fd73b1f734833fab43b6835ae3cf361a45 CRCW0805560RFKEA RESISTOR, 0805, 560R , 1% R3-5 Source
2 31e514fef8b1a25ff0d68e2a19bcd43e3d06d3dd CRCW080510K0FKEA RESISTOR, 0805, 10KR , 1%,0.125W R1-2 Source
8 4c4e7d785bd1e13b54cc06b848dcf9de7fa027f5 VAOS-5050RGB-W1 LED, RED / GREEN / BLUE, PLCC-6 D1-8 Source
1 2325605b24ac8b917cff14aa6ec4f8b982763d1f 929836-03-36 Pin Strip Header JP1 Source
5 7e2a9fc4b7aa19a7c9371b6ba323a9c9d43b5363 08055C104KAT2A CAPACITOR, 0805, 0.1UF, 50V C1, C3, C4, C6, C8 Source
1 C1512b39de43956d037b11c36a9d63bd4772bfe3 1206YD106KAT2A CAPACITOR, 1206, 10UF, 16V, X5R C2 Source
3 10383ecc3b7fb23a0eddc089913e3b427b343b18 B45196H3106K109V17 CAP TANT 10UF 16V 10% 1206 C5, C7, C9 Source
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Steps

1. Solder the AVR chip

Apply a generous amount of paste flux across the pads on the board and place the chip. The dot on the chip should match the dot on the silkscreen. Adjust the position until the pins are well centered on the pads. Tack down the chip on 2 opposite sides and solder the remaining pins. Preferably use 0.5mm rosin core solder.

1

2. Pull-up resistors and decoupling caps

Apply flux to the board, place the part, apply a bit of solder to the clean tip of the iron, pin down the part with curved tweezers and solder one side. Solder the other side as usual and touch up the first joint if necessary.

R1, R2, C1, C2, C3

2 3 4

3. FUSE settings & bootloader

Now that all parts are soldered that are necessary to power up the microcontroller, let's do that. This will also tell if the thing is alive at all. The FUSE bits of the ATmega168 should be changed to these values:

LFUSE: 0xE2
HFUSE: 0xDD
EFUSE: 0x04

With 'avrdude' that looks like (one-liners!):

avrdude -c $PROGRAMMER -p atmega168 -B 100 -P $PORT -b $BAUDRATE -e -U lock:w:0x3F:m -U lfuse:w:0xE2:m -U hfuse:w:0xDD:m -U efuse:w:0x04:m

avrdude -c $PROGRAMMER -p atmega168 -B 1 -P $PORT -b $BAUDRATE -U flash:w:optiboot_pro_8Mhz.hex -U lock:w:0x0F:m

Replace all $-variables with ones suitable to what You have. The bootloader hex file can be found in the Arduino IDE 1.0 folders.

If this step succeeds without error messages, we can continue with the remaining parts.

4. LED drivers

Solder the SO-16 chips the same way as the microcontroller: flux, orientation, tack down, solder remaining pins.

The parts list shows the STP08CP05, whereas the schematic in the zip-file shows the MBI5168. Both chips are pin-compatible, so you can use either. The latter ones may be cheaper and are available in the US at 'kingelectronics'. I'm not in any way linked to them nor do I get payed for this. They have a wide range of LED driver chips from Macroblock. Most of them look quite useful to me.

The remaining parts for this step are easy to solder, only make sure the orientation of the tantalum capacitors is correct - otherwise they will blow up.

R3, R4, R5, C4, C6, C8, C5, C7, C9

5 6 7

5. RGB LEDs

Depending on which type of RGB LED you have, either place the orientation mark towards the center of the board or towards the outer edge.

Looking at the D3 footprint on the circuit board, the anodes of the LEDs should face downwards.

In case you had to flip the LED by 180°, you will have to make a small adjustment in the code to correct the color reversal. This is easily done by flipping 2 or 3 short lines of code, namely:

spi_transfer(bcm_red);
spi_transfer(bcm_green);
spi_transfer(bcm_blue);

You can adjust these 3 lines to get the correct sequence of the data going out to the LED drivers.

Watch out: these LEDs don't like heat. If you can, turn down your soldering iron to about 250°C (482°F) and be especially careful with the leg of the LED that has the least metal visible in the top window. If it gets too hot, the plastic melts and you will pull out the pin a bit (due to surface tension in the solder) and thereby rip off the bonding wire to the LED chip. This is fatal and cannot be undone.

8

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Revisions



5 - Updated code/design-files + another step.
4 -
3 - Added links about BCM / BAM / MIBAM
2 -
1 - Initial project release



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