The Arduino Uno has something like 13 digital I/O pins and 5 analog I/O pins which can be re-tasked to act like digital pins bringing the grand total of 18 possible Digital I/O pins to work with… so what happens when you need to work with more than 18 different devices? For example… what if you wanted to independently strobe 19 LEDs?
Here, I've connected 3 LEDs directly to the Arduino UNO's digital I/O pins 2,3 and 4. In this configuration, I could control at most 18 LEDs independently.
I’ve come up with a project which faces just such a problem… I want to be able to independently light up and update 32+ little 20×2 LCDs with a single Arduino. To give a little context, each LCD has 16 pins, 8 of which are data pins. This means that 8 of the 18 digital out pins from the Arduino must be used for sending data to the LCD. That hardly seems like more than one could possibly be driven by a single Arduino! Clearly, if my plan is to be realized, I need to come up with a scheme that doesn’t involve directly driving all the LCDs from the Digital I/O pins.
Remembering back to my Structural Computer Organization class, I realized the answer: Demultiplexing.
Here, I'm controlling 6 LEDs with only 3 pins through a 3-8 multiplexer. Chaining multiplexers together, I could control 2^N LEDs with N pins.
A Demultiplexer or Decoder is a component made up of logic gates that takes a combination of inputs and chooses a corresponding output. Generally, for you can choose from 2^N outputs with N inputs. Learning about them in class is one thing.. but actually sticking them on a breadboard is another. I chose this Demultiplexer: the HD74LS138P. It’s a 3-input 8-output multiplexer. It turns out, though that it works counter to how I expected it to.. instead of the selected output being high, the selected output was low and the other outputs were high. When I hooked it up to my LEDs… all of the LEDs were on except for the one currently being selected!
Using a hex inverter, I was able to invert the outputs of the Decoder and make the selected output be on while having the other outputs stay off.
Ok… well, If I want the unselected outputs to be low while the selected is high, I need to invert the output of the multiplexer. It turns out that there are little chips that have a bunch of inverters built into them. The popular form factor seems to be the “Hex Inverter” which is simply 6 inverters crammed into a 14-pin package. I ended up using a MC54F04 to do it. It seems like every semiconductor makes identical hex inverters, so Jameco‘s catalog just says “popular manufacturer”. Anyhow, you can see from the photo to the left, using the inverters, we now have selected output being on and unselected outputs being off.
If you’re curious about the code that I used for this setup? Here it is.. It’s pretty simple:
int count = 0;
int values[8][3] = {
{ LOW, LOW, LOW },
{ LOW, LOW, HIGH },
{ LOW, HIGH, LOW },
{ LOW, HIGH, HIGH },
{ HIGH, LOW, LOW },
{ HIGH, LOW, HIGH },
{ HIGH, HIGH, LOW },
{ HIGH, HIGH, HIGH },
};
void setup() {
pinMode(2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
count = (count + 1) % 8;
digitalWrite(2, values[count][0]);
digitalWrite(3, values[count][1]);
digitalWrite(4, values[count][2]);
delay(1000);
}
In the setup method, we say that pins 2, 3, and 4 are assigned output roles. In the loop, we increment our count variable and if the count exceeds 7, it gets set back to 0. We then set our pins HIGH or LOW depending on the count’s offset in our table of values. We also put a 1 second delay between loop executions so that the loop doesn’t happen too quickly to see.
One kind of annoying problem that I ran into while stringing up my Decoder was, it has 3 pins called G1, G2a and G2b which are effectively enable pins. G1 must be HIGH and BOTH G2a and G2b must be ACTIVELY LOW in order for the demultiplexer to work. I didn’t realize it and only connected G2a to ground… so naturally nothing worked because G2b was not actively being set to LOW (not directly connected to ground). It wasn’t until I grounded both pins, that the decoder started decoding.
Continuing with my efforts to learn SDL, I’ve drawn kind of a silly set of bitmaps that will be sewn together to form a landscape.
