The MHVBoard is a low cost Arduino clone, based off the Metaboard.

It offers a TTL serial port, USB programming, ICSP, Arduino compatible headers and hardware already set up for software USB via V-USB.

While the original Metaboard did not choose to issue a license, our revisions are licensed under TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License.

With WinAVR marked as inactive, and no official release yet from Atmel, we have built our own set of tools in a WinAVR-like layout suitable for use as a replacement. Please note that no guarantees as to fitness or suitability are being made. In particular,GCC 4.5.1 has not been tested as extensively as GCC 4.4.x, so use our builds at your own risk.

I have finally posted a video of my HT1632-AVR library in action. There's not a lot to the video but I am sick of trying to get Adobe Premiere to play nice with my (possibly lack of supported) CODECS.

I, like many people, was excited to learn of the Sure Electronics LED Matrix displays going for cheap on ebay. Sure' makes several different LED displays, the most common being the 0832; in red (DE-DP104) or green (DE-DP105) and the 2416; also in red (DE-DP016) or green (DE-DP017).

This is the story of why I wrote my HT1632-AVR library. If that's of interest to you; read on, if you're just after the code; it's in devdsp/HT1632-AVR on GitHub.

Introduction

H1632-AVR is my attempt at making an Arduino and generic AVR compatible library to interface with Hoktek's HT1632 LED driver IC; the main component in a number of LED matrix displays available from Sure Electronics. Here is the description of the HT1632 IC from the manufacturer:

I'm working on a simple lighting display for a friend's night club event. It's based on 9 Aerpro 'neon' under car lights and will be sequenced by an Arduino.

I've decided that this would be a good a time as any to design my own Arduino shield and to start having a serious attempt at using gEDA.

In order to minimize component count, stocked items in my junk box, and to improve efficiency as well as have software control of the power supply, I wanted to do away with inefficient, standalone linear regulators and instead use spare PWM pins on the microcontroller to generate voltages instead.

I have written a library which creates a simple feedback loop, where you specify the target voltage, and the microcontroller alters the PWM duty cycle to create the requested voltages.

I bought a couple of these displays from Sure Electronics (an Ebay vendor) for an upcoming project.

The displays each consist of 4 LED modules, each module consisting of 8x8 LED chips, each under its own plastic diffuser lens.

Getting stuck into my LED matrix project, I soon ran into memory problems on the Arduino.

It turns out you can stick constant data into program memory using the PROGMEM directive, with macros provided to get it back out without having to have everything residing in RAM simultaneously.

There is a good tutorial on how to use it on the AVRFreaks forums.

I came across this site with a bunch of pre-canned recipes for bit manipulation: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html