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This is a library for Arduino (and esp32-arduino) to drive FDS132 LED boards.

FDS132 led boards are boards with 3 areas of 7x90 red LEDs.

How they work

The FDS132 is driven as a 270-LED wide line of height 7. There are shift- register chips chained to form a 270-bit register, which can be used to show a pattern for 1 row at a time.

Where to get them

The boards are occasionally available from https://www.baco-army-goods.nl/

Electrical connection

You can read more about the board at http://arduinows.blogspot.nl/2013/04/fds132-ledmatrixbord.html

This library works with the CPLD chip removed from the board. You connect the following pins that used to be driven by the CPLD to your arduino/esp32:

schematic thanks to Rudi from arduinows

Instead of soldering the tiny CPLD pads, it is easier to solder against the resistors next to them (you can double-check with a multimeter that you have the right one):

board connected to ESP32

You also want a 7,5V power adapter to power the board itself (via the white connectors).

How to use this library

See the 'examples' directory for some examples on how to use this library. In short, you create a fdsScreen instance and use setPins() to configure which pins are used for what. Then you have to call initialiseLetters() to initialise the letters.

The library has 2 buffers: a text buffer and a bitmap buffer.

  • mainScreen.addString() sets the characters in the text buffer
  • mainScreen.update() clears the bitmap buffer and renders the text in the text buffer to the bitmap buffer
  • mainScreen.display() briefly lights up the right LEDS for each row

By calling mainScreen.display() often enough from your loop(), you get a visually stable image.