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Requirements
Andreas Rottach edited this page Mar 9, 2018
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Here is a list of part you need. In this document I won't go into too much details, how to build your own wooden table. If you are not very good at dealing with woodwork, you could just buy a small table and put the LED matrix on top of it. Additionally, I will just give the general instructions to setup the hardware. You need to be able to solder a few connections!
To use this system with all its features, you need the following components:
- Table with a size of approx 100 x 70 mm
- Raspberry Pi: I used a Raspberry Pi 2 B+ for that job but it should work with any Linux based platform (please try it and give me feedback ! 😄).
- LED-Strip: I used an WS2812B LED-Strip with 300 LED's (2 x 5 meter with 150 LED's each). The more LED's you use, the more power you need 😄!
- LED-Strip-Controller: To control the LED's strip, I used the Diamex LED-Player. Basically you should be able to use any USB-LED-Controller with minor tweaks but it has to support the TMP2-Protocol. Unfortunately, I only found the German version of the protocol documentation but it is basically a binary protocol to control LED-Strips and -Matrices. The controller has to be visible in Linux as a serial device, were we can send our data to. More on that in the software setup instructions below.
- Power-Supply: Obviously, we need some kind of power supply to drive the full circuit in all possible scenarios (a bright white display requires the most power!). For that task, I used something like this one. You need a power supply with 5 Volt output voltage and up to 10 Ampere current to drive the LED matrix as well as the Raspberry Pi. If your amount of LED's differs strongly from my suggestions, you have to re-compute the requirements for your own setup!
- Pixel-Grid: We need some kind of grid layout that overlays the LED-Matrix. Otherwise we would see intermixed colors from adjacent cells instead of clear and sharp squared pixels as you can see on the start page of that Wiki. You can build your own grid by using wood. I was too lazy to build the grid that way and therefore I designed a 3D-printable grid segment with 3x4 pixels each. By printing the grid segment several times and gluing the parts together I got a perfectly flat grid with a resolution of 15 by 20 pixels. You can download the grid segment on Thingiverse. It can obviously just be used with the same LED density (150 LEDs per 5 meter).
- Cables: You also need some basic equipment such as a USB-Cables and a few normal wires to connect everything.