Category Archives: Display


Making a SPL dB Meter

In the 1980s, there was no internet as like today and so the sources of entertainment were televisions, radios and cassette players. When I was a kid, we had an audio cassette player. We used it to play songs but my imagination was always fixed to its VU meter display with its fancy readings as shown below. It changed with the volume of the speakers and matched rhythmically with the sound coming out of it. During my engineering career, I got to know about the Decibel scale and sound pressure measurement. It soon became a goal for me to design

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Flexible smartwatch using e-ink display

Nick Ames aims to build a thin and flexible smartwatch with a wrap-around touchscreen display made of a 4.9″, 720×120 EPD (e-ink) screen. Besides time telling, the smartphone also features health sensors to count your steps and monitor pulse rate and blood oxygen level. This is also Nick’s official entry to Hackaday 2017 contest. Check out his project page for more details on it.  

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Design considerations for a wireless LED sign

This application note from Texas Instruments describes the hardware design considerations for making a multi-sport scoreboard that is cost efficient, portable, easy to use, and support wireless transmission of display data. This application report describes the selection of the following: an appropriate LED display, a controller system, a communication system, and software for building the wireless LED-based scoreboard. Different techniques are included to drive the LED display from a microcontroller as well as some test results. This application report is only for displaying numerals on the scoreboard but the same concept can be applied to display alphabets. A similar concept can be extended to

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