Copyright (c) 2016 Jason Cerundolo
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An interface board between a Particle Photon and an RGB Matrix Panel. A CPLD provides the interface between the two and handles protocol conversion.
Pick up an RGB LED panel from Adafruit. https://www.adafruit.com/products/2026
Pick up a CPLD backpack from Reclaimer Labs. http://reclaimerlabs.com
Use with the matching Particle library. https://github.com/ReclaimerLabs/RGBmatrixpanelCPLD
This board allows the use of hardware timers and DMA to achieve low overhead transfers of information to the matrix panels. The CPLD on the backpack converts SPI data into the parallel format expected by the matrix panel. The only ongoing computation needed from the CPU is to set up the next DMA transfer and compute the time to display the next row of bit data. This take the CPU time needed from ~40% to <1% for two 32x32 panels. The limited factor is now RAM and transfer speed.