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PicŪ Basic
This article appears on the Amicus web site. Using the Proton compiler and a low cost, nice looking LED dot matrix board, this projects shows how easy it is to drive........ All those flashing LEDs!
Amicus is a multifuntion development system inspired by the popular Arduino board, however, the Amicus board uses a Microchip PICŪ microcontroller instead of an Atmel AVRtm type.
By Les Johnson
Browsing the internet, I came across a rather nice looking LED dot matrix board, and the price was incredibly low. The board in question is the Sure 2416, and is available from Ebay. I couldn't resist buying one. All those flashing LEDs!
Once the board arrived, I looked around the internet for some information on it. There is lots of information out there, it's just a matter of locating it. The obvious first place to look was the driver chip's website (Holtek in this case), where I found interfacing code to the HT1632 device, and an application note written in the most obscure C dialect. This was a starting point, as it gave a general understanding of how to talk to the board.
However, there was one piece of good code from Timothy Gilmore for use with the SXB compiler. This was written for the Sure 0832 board, which uses the same HT1632 driver chip, but has a different layout of LEDs.
With this code, the chinese application note, and the HT1632 datasheet at hand, I could now write Amicus18 code in order to talk to the board.
As the name suggests, the board consists of a matrix of 24 rows by 16 columns of Red LEDs, and is controlled by a dedicated chip, namely the Holtek HT1632. The datasheet for the 2416 board can be downloaded from here: Sure2416 Display Board.pdf, and the HT1632 chip's datasheet can be downloaded from here: HT1632.pdf........ Read More
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