TLC5940 library for chipKIT

As part of our keyboard project, a friend and I set out to develop a library for the chipKIT to communicate with the TLC5940 LED Driver. The chipKIT, if you’re not familiar, is a 32-bit arduino clone that runs on the PIC32MX family of processors. While Digilent, the company behind the chipKIT, has done a great…

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Catching Up

A lot has happened on the Keyboard project since I last posted. Let’s get you up to speed. After etching the TLC boards in the last post, we drilled holes for the components and began mounting them. It quickly became apparent that the boards were of less quality than they seemed. The traces were very…

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Etching a Circuit Board

As we started formulating our keyboard project, it quickly became apparent that we’d need a handful of circuit boards. Initially, it was my intention to order them from a site like batchpcb.com. Typically, circuit boards are printed in mass quantities, but when you need just one or two copies of a particular board, sites like…

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Propeller & TLC5940

When we began work on this project, we were planning on using an arduino at the heart. However, after some initial tests, we found that the arduino just wasn’t powerful enough to keep up with all of the processing that we wanted to do. A friend pointed us towards the propeller platform. While I wasn’t…

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The Keyboard Project

Greetings internet! This blog will serve as my build log for a project I recently dreamed up. I’ll be working on the project with a friend or three. The idea is simple: add a whole bunch of LEDs to a friend’s Korg Triton keyboard. Of course it wouldn’t be spectacular unless we tapped into the…

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