As I was playing with PureData, I had to think back to my hardware controller/midi sequencer project. It is/was on hold, as other projects seemed to be more important. Also, I was kinda running into a wall trying to implement the readout of the rotary encoders. Probably it’s their quality, probably I’m simply too dumb to implement it properly.
Nevertheless, today I dived back into the game. Another thing that bugged me was the LED output. I want a 8×8 matrix in tri-color mode (using dual LEDs) and my first idea was to use two synced MAX matrix drivers. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to really sync them, and so the whole thing flickered like hell. Now I’ll go for the traditional route and implement the display using three 595 shift registers. My Arduino based prototype already works quite well, although I am well aware that this will be another challenge when running inside the half/seq code because the refresh routine must be extremely fast. I really need to dig into AVR assembler now.
Well, here’s the code, anyway:
