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!