I started development of a clock using some similar displays (except 256x64 pixels).
https://sites.google.com/site/tristansideas/electronics/pinball-display-clock Sadly a lack of time has prevented me from finishing the project so far. They can pretty much be driven from the SPI peripheral of most micros. I used an MSP430 for testing. This allowed each row of display data to be shifted in using one of the DMA channels with minimal interrupt/CPU usage just to latch each row keep track of the number of rows. I was able to achieve 4 levels of grey pretty easily. The chip on the dev board I used didn't have RAM to hold the entire frame buffer so I was using an external SPI SRAM (also DMA driven). This was not intended to be the long term design and I would use a part with enough RAM on board. I've been thinking of driving them from a BeagleBone Black. Simply because the PRU's available would be capable of doing the real time processing required. Trammel Hudson used this method to drive a Mac-SE display and only minimal changes would be required to run a DMD. https://trmm.net/Mac-SE_video That's not to discourage the use of an FPGA. Even without one I was able to exceed the 200Hz maximum using the MSP430 (they still seem to work at > 200Hz). These displays do use a fair amount of power. They can get warm. They also have a tendency to produce a high pitched whine when operating. They did run in pinball machines in arcades pretty much non-stop but they do wear out eventually. There are LED based replacements available now but that lacks a certain something that you can only get from neon. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/354a9fb0-9304-4e9e-913e-e24a1df5f38a%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
