Close

PDSP-1881 16x4 Display

A project log for Retro Alphanumeric LED Displays + Libraries

Exactly as the title says, these are a few retro led displays I've strung together to make 16x2 modules with some software I wrote

sjm4306sjm4306 05/24/2021 at 14:161 Comment

So that worked out pretty well for the DL1414 LED displays, so let's try even rarer LED displays that can do full 5x7 alphanumeric characters. I found a few lots of PDSP-1881 and 1884 8 character displays (a total of around 20 displays each) on ebay a few years ago without breaking the bank (I think I paid about $60 for the whole shebang). The problem is now they are even harder to find and thus much more expensive (last I checked about $30-40 per display!!!). So what should I do with these beauties? Well why not give them the same character matrix pcb treatment as the DL1414's?

I went full out on my first iteration and made a massive 32x4 matrix.

Yeah but there was a few ... issues with this iteration. First off only the chip selects for all 20 displays were wired to shift registers, the rest of the required parallel io needed to be wired to gpio (this meant I needed a good 25 or so free pins on whatever chip I wanted to control the displays). In the pic above I ended up using a PIC16f887 to control the display but even then I used up nearly all the gpio on the chip so that was all it could interface with. The PIC is hidden under the display but I tell you it looks like that scene from the Matrix with all those cables wired to Neo when he wakes up in that energy harvesting pod/tank in the real world. 

A second major issue was with all 128 characters lit the display as a whole consumed well over an amp of current (and got toasty enough to ... well erm toast toast ...). This coupled with the lack of decoupling capacitors (pun unintended) on the board (an embarrassing oversight sure), meant the display was prone to browning out and crashing the pic in the process. So as a proof of concept this iteration wasn't a complete failure ... but it kinda was a complete failure as a practical implementation.

So back to the drawing board, I decided to pare the display down to 16x2 to limit max power consumption and generated heat and also decided to decrease the gpio requirements down to a single spi serial port by using shift registers to drive all required pins of the display. This effectively meant I was trading hardware complexity for software complexity.

This is the design I settled on:

Notice the large bulk tantalum decoupling cap right at the power input pin and individual ceramic local caps at each display, looks like I really had my thinking CAP on when I was designing this board! Anyway, bad dad puns aside,  I really wanted to mount the smd shift registers on the back and make the pcb barely larger than the PDSPs mounted on the front but it ended up being too tight a fit for a two layer board so I just went the easier albeit less aesthetic route.

I threw together two boards as soon as they arrived from JLCPCB (obviously one each for the 1881 and 1884, yellow and green display versions respectively). Here's a pic I shot as soon as I got the software working properly.

A beautiful display at full brightness with all characters lit without any thermal or brownout issues! So looks like the onboard caps did the trick.

For the software side, I ported my standard assortment of string/custom character/location write functions. The bit that took longer to get working was the function to actually generate the correct clock/data signals to write to each display. Initially I had all the bits backwards (that was a fun facepalm, but easily fixed). Then I found I was getting gibberish due to forgetting to wire up the read pin correctly so it was randomly floating, cause really weird write behavior (don't worry I bodged this first rev of pcbs and already fixed the eagle files/gerbers). In the end though both the pcb and software seem to work reliably enough so I guess I can finally call this a success for now. So what's the plan for this display ... well I was thinking of making a desk clock that would scroll weather, traffic and grab the time off of wifi. Seeing as this display looks very much like those much larger versions you see on some highways I though it'd make a cute little facsimile that could live on my desk.

Discussions

ziggurat29 wrote 06/09/2021 at 18:02 point

stunning!  I covet your ebay score.  I missed out years ago on a bunch of green 1414s and I still rue that day.
I still have a handful of 1416s from the '80s.  My boss back then was exasperated because I loved to design them in.

  Are you sure? yes | no