Electronic – arduino – Best way to control 130 – 140 LEDS with Arduino Uno 32/64 bit led drivers

arduinodriverledmultiplexer

I am new to electronic prototyping and had a few questions.

I need to control 132 LEDs individually. I want to make 3 rows ( 2 rows of 60 and 1 row of 12) I think i can matrix them but i would still need 63 outputs (3 high, 60 long).

I don't want to use 8 different shift registers.
Are there any 32 bit or 64 bit led drivers(or shift registers, not really sure what there are called)
And where can i buy them.

Any help is appreciated .

Best Answer

There is actually at least one 132-LED driver IC, the AS1130 132 LED driver with PWM ($2.99). This precisely matches your application requirement at least on the LED count.

AMS has a versatile set of LED drivers: For instance their 144 LED driver (AS1119) with its integrated charge pump for driving LEDs from a power rail lower than the forward voltage of your LED, might be of interest for your application.

To answer your specific questions:

  • Yes, AMS has both 32 channel and 64 channel constant-current LED drivers, besides the 132 channel and 144 channel ones. You won't even need current limiting resistors with such parts.
  • Other vendors appear to top off at 48-channel LED drivers, e.g. the Linear Tech LT8500, from a cursory search.
  • You can buy the AMS parts mentioned above from their web site, on the LED drivers page. Also, they have a generous sampling program, so you could try that route for your initial experiments.

The challenge you might face is on ready-to-use library support on your microcontroller or platform of choice, for the various LED drivers.

For this reason, my go-to part for similar requirements has been the merely 16-channel Texas Instruments TLC5940, in cascaded arrays, simply because libraries and general public-friendly write-ups exist on the web for it, for almost any microcontroller platform I have wanted to use with them - including for the Arduino platform.

Related Topic