It’s been a while since I’ve posted to my blog, but here is a video I just uploaded showing how I reverse engineer digital circuits.
I’ve been doing this sort of thing for as long as I can remember and I find it very relaxing at times. Nothing better than throwing some nice music on and doing a bit of reverse engineering.
I was recently given a dot matrix LED display by a friend and decided to reverse engineer it so we both can run them, he still has one of his own.
There is a damaged chip on the board which meant that some of the displays didn’t display their 2 bottom rows but I will be tackling this issue in a later video. I will also be transferring the control to a PIC instead of the Arduino as it was not fast enough to get a good refresh rate, and this is without any external communication facilities being addressed.
Here is the video:
The arduino sketch can be downloaded here
and the Design Spark schematic file can be found here
the PDF of this file can be found here
*There are a few parts not finished in the schematic, but there is enough to provide functional detail.
I hope you enjoy the video, I will eventually follow it up with the repairs and the porting to PIC.
bye for now!