Lamp Matrix Up and Running

[kendall...@gmail.com]

Hey I wanted to note to everyone that I had some progress this weekend
and I have my lamp matrix up and running. Or well I have a 2x2 matrix
up and running. I have almost finished wiring up the full 8x8 but ran
out of time yesterday. I'm also a couple 470k resistors short. I
think I've bought out all of my local radio cracks on them.

This said I'm excited to say that most of the electrical hurdles to my
effort are done. Now once I'm done wiring this up I'll be programming
to make sure I have a basis for a rule set working on the machine.

The way I have my matrix working right now is I'm using an ultimarc
pac-drive

http://www.ultimarc.com/pacdrive.html

I'm using plug 1-8 for the rows and 9-16 for the columns. I'm
strobing the columns and using a tip 107 with the typical set of
resistors for this, I'm also using a tip 107 for each row to protect
the board. Resistors are 470k with each bulb, for each pick up
resistor I'm using a 10k and for each port on the board I'm using a
1k. Another important part of this is I grounded the USB port
directly. This made sure that I wouldn't bounce back current to the
usb hub among other things.

The one problem I have right now is latency on this and I originally
tried to go on the millisecond for each row and the leds noticeably
flickered. Enough that it couldn't be ignored. So the route I'm
going now is grouping like bulbs and putting them in the same column
so for example when a target is struck it would blink rather than stay
on. That way when all of the targets in a bank are struck the lights
will blink as a unit. It'll take some getting used to, but this is my
solution. When I have this finalized I'll send a video out.