TRIKSC
Background
While there are a myriad of computer based controller hardware available that will run under the Vixen software for controlling Christmas lighting, there were no LED display panels that could be controlled thru Vixen. Robert Jordan decided that the Vixen community needed a LED sign and took it upon himself to design and prototype an LED scrolling board. While Robert had seen LED boards everywhere, he wanted on that allowed you to do text and animation. He envisaged a LED display board that could be your show sign and a place for animations during the show.
The LEDTRIKS board was popular, and the software control was quickly incorporated into Vixen by K.C. Yet it needed something extra....
Introduction to the Triks-C
The TRIKS-C was designed by TimW, and first introduced to the masses at the Melbourne Mini in 2008 http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx9GqKnV9us
The boards design was expanded to allow in-situ programming of the chip, various connection and capacitor types, as well as diagnostic and power LED’s as a collaboration between Wjohn and TimW.
After an initial round of Beta Testing both in Australia and the USA, it was released in time for Christmas 2008.
Why the Triks-C?
Many people felt that the Ledtriks was too much of a CPU hog for what it was doing. Much of the calculation for what was to be displayed was being done by the control computer, and this often caused significant load. In my case one full core of a Quad Core Q6600 was being run at 100% usage for just a single Ledtriks Panel to display a relatively static image.
The Ledtriks keeps control of the 768 LED’s on its panel by cycling through them very quickly, faster than you can see. The actual Ledtriks board can only remember and display one row (48 Leds) at a time. So whatever sends information to the Ledtriks has to continuously keep updating the panel, one row at a time, many times a second, regardless of whether the LED’s in each row are changing or not. Data, row addressing, clock signals, strobe signals all need to be generated out the parallel port to keep the display ‘alive’. (Refer to the Ledtriks Manual for a more technical discussion of how all this refreshing works).
This means a direct connected Ledtriks creates a fair bit of load on the computer driving the board.
The Triks-C uses a small ATTINY2313 microcontroller to take care of this continuous refreshing. It still receives commands from the computer to update the display but the microcontroller can remember all of the rows at once – so the job of continuously refreshing the rows does not have to be done by the computer.
Because Parallel ports are becoming less common, and USB to Serial adapters or Multi-port serial cards are becoming a common item on our show PC’s, moving the Ledtriks from Parallel to Serial seemed like a logical next step. Using a small ATTINY2313 chip and a handful of other parts, the Triks-C takes the majority of the CPU load off the controlling PC as well as giving us an RS232 or RS485 interface to allow easier connections and longer runs while still maintaining a high speed data transfer to the Ledtriks screen. While it was possible to run the Parallel Ledtriks and Display off one pc, it usually required a separate PC just to control the Ledtriks. With the Triks-C and it’s companion program LTC, the whole display can be run of almost any modestly powered PC with no issues at all.
As of the time of writing, you can run a maximum of 4 Triks-C’s from the one serial port at once. This gives the user the choice of a single panel, 1 panel high and 2 wide, 1 panel wide and 2 high, or finally 2 panels high and 2 wide. Each Triks-C interfaces just one Ledtriks board. So for a single Ledtriks you need a single Triks-C, and for 2 Ledtriks boards, you need two Triks-C’s. Do not confuse the Ledtriks board with the Ledtriks LED holder board, of which 3 LED holder boards are used to hold the 768 LED’s for a single Ledtriks board.
Controlling the Triks-C?
The Triks-C in controlled by LTC.exe, a DOS perogram that is run at the command line.