LED Scolling Dot Matrix Font & Graphics Generator 5x8 5x7 8x8

If you are into geeking it out with projects of the electronical kind, then you have likely wanted to create a dot matrix display or a POV. To do this you will need to have a font file or table to read the characters from.


There are alot of ways to get this file. The common sizes of displays are 5x7 and 8x8. There's alot of places online where you can get ASCII 5x7 fonts, but I am making a scrolly display with 8x8's and I wanted to use the whole height of the matrix so I created this tool to easily format and create patterns and fonts and get them into the right format for C programming.  

The attached file was created in excel and it has a couple of macros which make things easy. You will fill in the display area with 1's and 0's and then click a button and it will store your pattern in some cells below and convert everything to a hexadecimal string for popping into your C compiler or header file.

The attached file includes 5x8 fonts for A-Z, a-z, 0-9, some punctuation, and some awesome 8x8 patterns and graphics.


Not that it matters, but I am using the AVR ATtiny2313 and AVRStudio 4.16 with WinAVR GCC for controlling my scrolling display. I don't have it done yet but atleast making the font file was easy with this tool.

Check out the steps in this instructable to find out how to use the Matrix Font Generator

Step 1 Open the Generator File - Get Excel Setup

Download and open the "Dot_Matrix_Font_Generator.xls" file. It contains macros which means you may have trouble opening it depending on your security settings. I promise that it is safe. You will need to enable and/or allow the macros to load for this to work. If you aren't prompted upon opening then this will we under either:
Tools>Options>Security   or  Tools>Macros>Security

Here's what Microsoft says about this
office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052356701033.aspx

***REQUIRED STEP***
For the excel functions to work you have to turn on one of the technical Add-Ins.
Go to  Tools> Add-Ins   and Check the "Analysis ToolPak". This will allow the functions to do their thing. If you don't have it installed follow Microsofts instructions here:
office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP011277241033.aspx

If you don't have the Add-In turned on then the column total cells in row #10 will show a #NAME.


Anyways,

The design is pretty intuitive.

Type a 1 for an LED you want on, a 0 for those you want off. Numbers other than 1 and 0 will cause the cell to turn red which means you better fix it or you get weirdness later. You will likely see ## or #NUM in those cells if you put something other and 1 or 0 in there.

Comments

[!damo!]

I have created a simple online version of this. Will be adding more features as I go along but so far outputs the matrix to hex and bin formats.

Check it out here http://box-fish.com/matrix-tool.php

Let me know if you want any features/changes/suggestions etc

[pasanlaksiri]

Thank you my friend. Its save my time a lot.

[luqvh]

roznerd,
can u give me the schematics of this project.. help is appreciated.. thx!
Luqman Rosley

[grunftz]

thx it helped me a lott :D

[parseInt]

tnx it helped me a lot.

[sakuyaki]

good job!

very useful for me, thank you!

[tomas123]

thanks for this great worksheet
I make same minor changes (excel 2003) for better working with 8x8 displays. You can now convert hex codes to the pattern editor.

[roznerd]

Right on! I'm glad you were able to hack it to work better for you. Thanks for sharing.

[NatureTM]

This worked great and I found it very useful for a project.  Thanks!

[roznerd]

Awesome! Glad it worked for you. Thanks for the feedback.

[ledtech]

roznerd, thanks a million for the inspiration. I feel like I'm on the way already. I love your prompt response and as I go along the way, will certainly update you with my progress which like you said would need some time with good study/research. I am really inspired and already believe I can do it with hard work.
Thanks for your concern and all those nuggets and starter resources you furnished in your reply. I can't say how long before I do master the tech and art but I put it tentatively at the next 6 months. Thanks!

[roznerd]

no problem. Good luck with your research and education. It took me about 6 months to get to the point where I was pretty proficient with C-code and doing basic tasks. I still have a lot to learn though, as we all do. If you ever have any more questions, let me know.

[ledtech]

Roznerd, I am totally new to this forum and have a deep interest in Scrolling LED signage. I am a novice in this thing and the stuff about hexes and Concatenate is quite abstract to me. I need your help because I want to build such stuff myself. Where do I start from? Do I need to take lessons in Programming or something? I can make stationary LED signage but the electronics of this other interesting aspect (and the Programming of course) is what I hope to grasp now. Hope to hear from you and will be grateful for your assistance in what way you possibly can. Thanks. I'll drop you an email incase you have much more to say or info to send: [e-mail]

[roznerd]

ledtech - That's cool that you are interested in electronics and led stuff. There's alot to learn to get up to the point where you understand and can build a scrolling led display. There's some basic concepts you'll need to understand like "multiplexing" and you'll need to learn about shift registers (I have an instructable about them and there's lots of info out there on them).

Then once you kind of get those concepts, you'll need to learn how to program a microcontroller to handle the display and do the actual work. There's alot of good platforms out there for microcontrollers (MCUs). A good beginning point is the Arduino which is based on the Atmel AVR family of MCU's. This is the site to look at for that: http://www.arduino.cc/ They are kind of pricy at $28, but they will serve as the brain for your project. they are programmed in some free software using a language that is bascially watered-down C code. If you want to get a little closer to the "real thing", then you get go striaght into working with Atmel AVR's. They are more powerful and are programmed in standard C code. A programmer will be about $30, but then the actual MCU's are only $1-$4 each. This is the route I went. Here's a good place to start reading: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/avrstuff

You'll have to understand that this instructable for the Scrolling LED Fonts is just an easy way to create the code for each letter. There's alot of other things going on to get those letters onto the display. Getting started into programming and playing with microcontrollers is the first step. Once you have the skills and review some other peoples code for Scrolling LED displays, you'll be able to make your own.

Here's a good site that shows how a scrolling LED sign works and how to build one (his code is in assembler tho, so its not super useful unless you learn assembler code which is old school)

http://www.attiny.com/dotmatrix.htm ( you might have to look at the cached version on google becuz the site seems to be down today)

It's a journey. There's about 10 key concepts you'll need to understand about the features of a MCU to get the dot matrix LEDs to do what you want. If you go with the Arduino, there's a ton of guys out there who have already done led displays, and you could probably grab their code and just modify it as you see fit. The save is true for the AVR, but there's not as many guys using them as the Arduino because the Arduino is a bit easier for beginners.

You have a lot of reading to do on line and get started with MCU's a simple stuff like flashing LEDs, using 74HC595 shift registers, make a little POV circuit (googe it), maybe play with multiplexing some 7 segment displays, then you will be about ready to build a led scrolling display, grasshopper. There's a good instructables based on an AVR Attiny2313 (very common AVR MCU) that's called "64 pixels" and it's a simple scrolling sign. Here's a link to it:

http://tinkerlog.com/howto/64pixels/

Look through the code. Anyway, I hope this is all helpful. I can't convey all of it in an email. You're going to have to take itfrom here and start reading and playing around with MCU's. There's lots of resources out there. Good luck - roznerd

[tecate1]

I have seen POV's that are able to use multiple formats like .mov, mpg, etc.. How is that done? I would like to build a POV that I can input animation and video. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Wayne

[raghavnagpal]

thnx:)

[naranathubrandan]

wow

[kristiansmic]

TNX!

[Lee Wilkerson]

Hint: OpenOffice.Org version 3 can already deal with the data strings, etc. and it's FREE.
Beautiful project. I remember doing font creation by hand back in the day (25 years ago).

~/Lee

[tezo]

Thanks!

[roznerd]

Hey everyone - Thanks for all the hits. I fixed the slashes for automatically commenting out the "name" you give to the characters. It was "\\" which is wrong for AVR Studio. I corrected it to "//".

You may have already worked around this but I caught it while programming my POV project. So here you go. The latest version is up here. 

[Fred82664]

I am using open office ( better fit for my money ) It did not work out at first  but looking to the right side I think I found why it did not work at first    Make sure to load the Analysis ToolPak  so the BIN2HEX function will work  Tools>Add-Ins>check "Analysis ToolPak" 

after fixing that it worked out fine. good lible

[thatoneguydavid]

this looks great.   however, i use OpenOffice and for some reason the macros do not seem to make it through the translation.  do you think you could put up a text file with your macro code so that i could translate it in to OpenOfice?

thank you.

[roznerd]

Thanks. I'm not too familiar with OpenOffice but you should be able to figure out how to get the macros and the worksheet functions to work. The worksheet functions I use are BIN2HEX and CONCATENATE.

I have uploaded the VBA code with comments if you'd like to check it out

www.filedropper.com/dotmatrixfontgeneratorvbacode

[thatoneguydavid]

thanks, ill give that a try

P.S. OpenOffice is a completely free open source office suite

[roznerd]

frollard - You bring up a point that I forgot to mention. To get the functions to work you need to go to Tools> Add-Ins  and turn on the Analysis ToolPak. This is where most of the technical functions are kept.

Here's what Microsoft says about it:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052090031033.aspx

Doing this will solve your concatenate issue. I will edit the Instructable to make this clear. Hopefully it works for you. I don't see why it wouldn't.

Thanks for the feedback.

[frollard]

FANTASTIC!!!

I'm building a pov and want to build my own fonts, etc.  Arduino being really limited for memory I'm tempted to do as much of this procedurally as possible but why didn't I think to macro the crap out of excel?!  

Beautiful, simply beautiful.  Using good formulas, conditional formatting for error checking, and macros to assemble the rig.  BEAUTIFUL!

[frollard]

I spoke too soon:  the Concatenate and/or bin2dec functions crap the bed for me, shows as #NAME? for all fields.  Using excel 2003.

I hate using functions that appear and disappear between versions of office.  I would have opted to have a 128*D1+64*D2+32*D3...function to figure out the decimal, then display it as hex.  Super complex?  Yes, but guaranteed to work :D