MBI5030 starter board

By: madworm

Layout files (KiCad) / Code

As the title says, it is a small ‘dev-board’ that will get you started with the Macroblock MBI5030. Macroblock is a Taiwanese manufacturer whose product line includes a wide variety of very affordable and quite capable LED driver chips. They’re available at kingelectronics, a US based distributor for them.

The MBI5030 is a 16-channel constant current LED driver with 16/12-bit PWM. You send your data just once, feed the chip with a constant high frequency ‘grayscale clock’ and it takes care of the rest. Many AVR chips can be programmed (FUSE setting) to output their system-clock on a certain pin. That option is quite suitable to drive the ‘grayscale clock’.

The main idea for this board came when I was trying to write some code for that chip. I simply didn’t want to breadboard all of those LEDs, too many wires, wouldn’t easily survive transportation in a bag… With 16 onboard LEDs, all you need to wire is power and the SPI interface and you’ll get visual feedback instantly. When satisfied, pull the jumper, add high(er)-power LEDs and an external power supply to test the real thing.

I have found these chips quite valuable if you frequently deal with LED projects and have to keep the cost down. Chips from other major manufacturers (TI…) are nice too, but for a similar set of features they make you pay a lot, especially for small quantieties. It may be worth to have a look at the MBI chips, maybe even build a small stash of them. That saves shipping costs in the long run.