The RGB POV Prototype 1.0 boards showed up yesterday along with my Digikey order of sundry parts. Today was my friday off, but I spent most of it at work anyway because the rework station here blows any electronics fabrication facilities I might have at home (say, for instance... in the bathroom) out of the water.

I got the regulators populated and checked that they were working. Then I added the CPU and got it talking (this took about an hour longer than it should have, thanks to Keil's IDE having the wrong COM port assigned for the JTAG interface and burying the setting dialog somewhere unintuitive).

Next I wrote a skeleton firmware for it with a basic SPI API. Once I was convinced that I had control over the processor, I put a PWM driver and a single RGB LED on the board and voila!

Das Blinkenlight!

The nappy pair of jumper wires and trace cut in the middle there are courtesy of Silicon Laboratories having bizzarely different SPI specs on their various microcontrollers. On the C8051F120, which I'm used to using, if you aren't in multi-master mode you can use the NSS line as a chip select. And that's how I designed this layout. But unfortunately, on the C80510F007 seen here, the chip is always in multi-master mode and the NSS line is a useless input. Dorks...

Anyway, the PWM driver worked without a hitch and I have full control over the light output in both intensity and color. Next is to add the other two drivers and the other 9 LEDs and see if the daisy chaining works. Then, it's on to Persistence of Vision. Wh000t!