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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #473 – An Interview with Greg Davill

#473 – An Interview with Greg Davill

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Welcome once again to Greg Davill!

  • We had Greg on the show briefly during KiCon, episode 440.2, but we barely scratched the surface of the projects he’s working on. Greg showcases a lot of his work on Twitter, so take a look at the selected tweets below, that correspond to the things we discussed while recording. And of course…follow Greg on Twitter!

I've been having fun de-layering PCBs. So I thought I'd try out one of my own.

These are the panels on my LED d20. Each panel has driver circuitry for driving a 16×16 RGB matrix, but there are only 120 LEDs on the front in a 15 wide, 15 tall equilateral triangle. Fun to route. pic.twitter.com/eJ6coWJONS

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 17, 2019

Well I guess I'll just throw my LED polyhedra in the trash now! 😅

Excellent work @jipraus! It's even got wireless! 😍 https://t.co/fN6Q60Agcb

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 17, 2019

😁 pic.twitter.com/cdPZdcJmSV

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 16, 2019

New project? 😅 pic.twitter.com/Jl5eGmQA8r

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 14, 2019

😂 Good thing it's litteraly a one of a kind. 😂

Pretty easy to track down 😁 https://t.co/PFlunK4HfQ

— Greg (@GregDavill) November 17, 2019

This is all setup to use 6pin FFC cables between the panels to make assembly easier and to reduce wiring difficulties inside the 3d printed enclosure.

This method of LED driving has the advantage of being much lower power and MUCH cheaper than a solution using "smart" LEDs. pic.twitter.com/TunF5cB5w3

— Greg (@GregDavill) November 15, 2019

The controller board is also custom, it features a SAMD51 for generating pixels values/animations. Also an ice40 FPGA to handle driving 4 sets of 5-panel long strings.

This lets me hit an update rate ~120hz on the panels from the framebuffer, and 40-60Hz update of that buffer. pic.twitter.com/8NjOwffhQX

— Greg (@GregDavill) November 15, 2019

I bought myself a nice solder-paste squeegee.

I probably could have found one a bit more size appropriate for the boards I build >_< pic.twitter.com/DBKidwuIHX

— Greg (@GregDavill) September 28, 2019

A very cool design. LED geodesic sphere! https://t.co/xCGgBYQvL2

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 28, 2019

https://github.com/gregdavill?tab=repositories

They are replicating!! @esden @zzaurak @1HappyTeddybear pic.twitter.com/YCDQRbaRAq

— Greg (@GregDavill) December 28, 2019

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