Charlyplex update

Rickharris

Senior Member
Now Even MORE Leds per chip:

"The circuit consists of a Tiny13, 40 red LEDs of 3-mm size, a bunch of BC547 (NPN) and BC557 (PNP) transistors, a few resistors and a push button switch. The Tiny13 is mounted in an 8-pin socket. The schematic in pdf and eagle format are available here.

An important point to note is that the circuit uses 5 transistor pairs using NPN and PNP transistors and these transistors must be matched for their beta values, which is done easily with suitable multimeter with transistor check function.

Briefly, the way GuGaplexing works is as follows: The microcontroller pins operate in one of three possible states: 0, 1 or Z (the high impedence state). Charlieplexing technique makes use of this fact to increase the number of LEDs that can be controlled compared to the conventional multiplexing technique, which does not exploit the third state (i.e. the high impedence state 'Z') of the pin. Thus Charlieplexing manages to control N*(N-1) LEDs using N digital pins.

Now wIth 2 pins, there are eight logic combinations: 00, 01, 0Z, 10, 11, 1Z, Z0, Z1 and ZZ. So in principle with suitable decoding of these states, it should be possible to connect 8 LEDs using two pins only, ofcourse at the cost of additional external components for the decoding job. GuGaplexing does a compromise and uses a pair of transistors (NPN and PNP) per pin to decode four of the possible eight combinations. Thats how, for N pins, GuGaplexing achieves 2*N*(N-1), which is twice as many as Charlieplexing.

More details of the GuGaplexing LED display multiplexing technique will be available as a Design Idea on EDN (www.edn.com) in near future."

http://www.instructables.com/id/GuGaplexed-Valentine-LED-Heart/
 
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Mycroft2152

Senior Member
Rick,

Nice link. I'm just not sure that a PICAXE has the speed to charlieplex a large number of LEDS successfully (without flickering).

Yes, I know one of the forum posters claimed he was successful, but that was never proven nor duplicated.

Myc
 

rWAVE

Member
Gugaplexing Has Arrived at EDN!

Per Rick's crystal ball:

"More details of the GuGaplexing LED display multiplexing technique will be available as a Design Idea on EDN (www.edn.com) in near future."

Check out October 16, 2008 issue of EDN (page 58) or here.

Richard
 
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