Palabrica, Reneleo Martin S.

Digital Electronics II (Lab)

BSECE-3B
Dot LED Matrix to Parallel Port
In driving a 5x7 Dot LED Matrix, a driver IC like MAX6952 and MAX6953 are needed.
These ICs are almost exactly the same and the only difference is their data interfaces.
A third-party software is provided (https://bit.ly/357WKuj), and it is compatible with
earlier versions of Windows such as 95, 98, and XP. Instructions on how to install the program is
also provided in the self-extracting archive. The printer ports used are LPT1 and/or LPT2. The
program above uses 3 and 8 output lines of LPT port for SPI interface simulation and additional 2
lines for IC interface simulation. For reading blink status, one line of the port is used. Up to 16 in
series of IC MAX6952 can be controlled simultaneously. You can choose LPT1 or LPT2 within
the program interface. Port may be working in standard, ECP, or RPP mode. Connection circuit
below:

The software is executed and shown below. The initial state of registers of MAX6952 and
MAX6953 are seen here after power-up—select driver type: MAX6952 SPI or MAX6953- I2C.
Palabrica, Reneleo Martin S. Digital Electronics II (Lab)
BSECE-3B
It is possible to control 16 drivers when working in SPI mode. IC drivers are cascaded:
The Dout of the first IC driver is connected to the Din on the second IC driver of MAX6952.
Different controls are shown on the interface of the software. The number of drivers can
be adjusted using the slider “Number of Drivers”. When using more than 1 IC driver, check the
boxes called “Enable global driver write” and “Enable auto-increment”. This part is crucial
because during command execution, it will write the same data to all drivers and the driver counter
automatically increases.
SPI Interface can be tested with the function “Test Stream” after the program is started. It
can be found by clicking the “Port Connections and help” button. On I2C Mode, the program
allows controlling of up to 16 drivers (MAX6953). The first driver has the address of 1010000x
and increase depending on the nth number of the driver.

The “Design User fonts” button calls procedure that allows creating and storing user
symbols displayed in the Dot LED Matrix. Few pre-built symbols that are stored in the
MAX6952_fonts.txt file can be displayed by default.
User-defined symbols can be saved to the file or sent to drivers of the Dot Matrix. A certain
data format is as follows:
Font 0Data 00011100Data 00011100Data 00011100Data 00011100Data 00011100
Font 1Data 01111111Data 01111111Data 00111110Data 00011100Data 00001000

Font 2Data 00000000Data 00000000Data 01111111Data 00000000Data 00000000…

Font “xx” shows font number where “xx” can be from 0 to 23.
Dataxxxxxxxx – one row of 8-bit data for dot LED matrix (up to 7 rows for one symbol)
Data is saved for MSB to LSB which describe symbol.

Source: https://bit.ly/3cCblTc