Overview / Usage

The main issue during this project was to be able to deliver a high framerate to a display and the display has to be mounted onto a mask. This gave us only one choice, Addressable LEDs, since lcd is not bright enought, OLED is way to expensive to have custom manufactured, and available ledwalls are too big. For this we need a lot of LEDs and a lot of Power. We used the smallest addressable LED on the market, APA102-2020 and put 180 LED in a 35mm * 70mm 4 layer PCB giving us the most dense led wall available on the market, and also the smallest one. Every panel is connected in series with another one, and the next one is connected to another data channel to avoid data corruption due to signal jitter. Every channel is driven in parallel at 20MHz, and we have appropriate fast drivers for every channel. Here is a video of it, where i explain sort of how it works, that one was the alpha version,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirYlSKBj-M

And lastly this is the final version.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/9QV3yVaK2kJrsna5A

Methodology / Approach

Our approach was to tackle every problem one by one, first deal with one small panel by it self, then drive two in parallel, then deal with the ton of data. Regarding power delivery, it required many iteration before getting a stable 5V supply able to give us the 60A needed for the mask to operate.

Technologies Used

Intel UPBoard, Intel Graphics.

Repository

https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED