Manuel Polo's LED Driver Board Offers a Vintage Alphanumeric Display, I2C IO Expansion
Adding 16 GPIO pins, or six if you use the bundled four-character alphanumeric LED display, plus PWM control, Polo's board is multi-purpose.
Manuel Polo has launched a unique LED driver board design: It's built to drive a vintage JPDL-1414 alphanumeric display, and to offer 16-bit input/output (IO) expansion at the same time.
"[I] needed to have a great retro display like the HPDL-1414 (4 columns) and drive it via I2C," Polo writes of the board's inspiration. Also have more extra GPIOs for extensibility, even included PWM driver for LEDs."
Based around the Awinic AW9523B chip Polo's driver accepts 2.5-5.5V inputs, offers 16 independently-configurable general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, of which six are available if the HPDL-1414 display is added, plus a pulse-width modulation (PWM) mode for LED controls across 256 levels per LED and four global brightness levels.
The compact 25x22mm (around 0.98x0.87") board is compatible with any system that includes an I2C bus, with a custom-written open source library available for Arduino-compatible microcontrollers and Raspberry Pi support available through the i2c-tools and python-smbus packages.
The driver board and bundled LED display is now available from the MrMx Labs Tindie store, priced at $13.94 — down from $15.49 — as a fully-assembled unit, or $11.69 as a kit of parts.