some changes

At first we decided to use a RGB LED strip as application but we changed our minds, now we're going to make an 8x8 RGB LED matrix instead. We found a site were a 8x8 RGB LED matrix was used with an arduino uno board and we are going to that design as a base for our project. This RGB LED matrix design is the one we are going to base our circuit on.

We are have problems for the moment with finding a supplier in Europe who has a RGB LED matrix. It's surprisingly hard to find. We prefer to use the COM-00683 RGB LED matrix.

We are hoping to find an 8x8 RGB LED matrix and otherwise we will have to make it by ourselves with 64 separate RGB LED's. I also drew a schematic of the circuit we are going to use, you can see this here:

A close up of the LED matrix:

Block diagram

Today we completed our plan of approach, we made some very important decisions and we drew rough a block diagram of our project. I'm going to give a little bit of information below about the parts of this block diagram.

This is a general block diagram of our project. We are going to order different NFC-cards (or RFID-tags). We decided to use the NFC Shield [SLD80453P] as NFC-reader.

Because a NFC-reader circuit is High-Frequency it is difficult to make it yourself because with High-frequency circuits you must take parasitic capacitances into account and you have to have the right frequency and so on.. so we decided to order this PCB and make our own Microcontroller PCB probably with a ATMEGA328 microcontroller like in the arduino-board but that is still an issue.

We were not sure what we were going to do with the RBG LED's, eventually we decided to use a Digital Addressable RGB LED strip.

This Digital Addressable RGB LED strip has LED drivers build in on the strip, this is very useful because if we would make this by ourselves we would have an enormous PCB so we decided to order this as well. The LED drivers they use are the LPD8806 (in the newer versions of this product) and the HL1606 (in the older versions of this product). The color of the RGB LED's are controlled by using PWM.

Welcome

On this blog we will frequently post updates about our project. We have been assigned to make a project with NFC or Near Field Communication. At first we didn't know what kind of application we would make with NFC but we decided to make something with RGB LED's. The purpose of our project is that the RGB LED's will change color with each different RFID-tag.

Now we are still gathering information by searching the web. More update about our project will be posted soon.