LED Driver for temp display.

[booski]

Was bumming around on RS website looking for an LED driver to use potentially with an LM60/61 sensor for an indoor thermometer for kicks when I come across this:

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/led-driver/0453261/

http://docs-europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/0add/0900766b80addaca.pdf

It can control up to 34 outputs and was thinking it'd possibly have some uses as I was hoping to find a pair of 4026's for 2 seven segment displays but this just looks awesome!

It uses a 3 wire serial interface which is easily bit banged and I've got code for bit banging anyway so an 08M would be plenty (I think)

Question is, does it seem a plausable thing to use?

EDIT: My bad, doesn't look like it is. Requires 36 bits to be shifted in and currently, I've only managed to shift 16 bits with my previous code

 

[Dippy]

Interesting.

Incidentally:
"EDIT: My bad..."

Your "bad" what? Breath?

 

[booski]

Well, its my bad because it's not looking for a serial input to select which led's to light up or not, but more of a bit scheme where if bit 14 was 1, then it'd light up segment 14 on the display, rather then send the number to the chip using a spi bus and the chip decoding it and outputting to the display.

Bah, bite the bullet I say...

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/counter-shift-register/6629590/

10x 4026's for £2.55 +vat, can't complain!

 

[hippy]

Question is, does it seem a plausable thing to use?

It does to me. In fact I was going to use one a few years ago but at that time it seemed to have become obsolete, then it reappeared on Rapid but it looked like it had gone from there again last time I looked.

It doesn't appear to be a multiplex driver so it looks like it could be usable as a replacement for a string of SIPO shift registers; very handy perhaps if you want to access a big chunk of SRAM or EPROM which I recall is what I was contemplating. Streaming out 36 bits shouldn't be a problem, SHIFOUT should be perfect for that, or pure bit-banged.

 

[booski]

Ah well, I've just bought the 10x 4026's, but, I didn't even know SHIFTOUT could do such a thing?!
Wish I had of known that when I did my amplifier instead of bit banging the entire thing, would have made life a LOT easier.

So that means then hippy, when getting chips, I don't have to specifically look for chips that use I2C only, but SPI as well? and use the SHIFTOUT/SHIFTIN command to access them?

 

[eclectic]

@booski

1. Search the Forum, using the terms

5450
5451

for background.

2. BUY some.
They appear to be rare beasts that occasionally surface.

Brigadoon.

e