This book explains how to turn the datasheet and application notes for the TLC5940, a 16 channel LED driver with dot correction and grayscale PWM control, into an unencumbered C library for use with an AVR microcontroller. This library uses the CLKO pin of the AVR to drive the GSCLK line of the TLC5940, which allows grayscale values to be updated at 3906.25 Hz with a CLK_I/O of 16 MHz, and 4882.8125 Hz with a CLK_I/O of 20 MHz.

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10/1/2011: I haven't updated the book yet, but I added (configurable) multiplexing support to the library. You can use either common cathode or common anode RGB LEDs. Download src.zip and look inside code/ch9 for the updated library, and demonstration code.

The multiplexing code even runs fast enough to create a 24-bit, gamma corrected, persistence of vision toy. Source code and schematics for this are also included in src.zip, under the code/rgb-pov and schematics/ directories respectively.

1/8/2011: I updated the src.zip with the new multiplexing code, which is much faster than the previous version. Client code should not need modification, unless it previously depended on the internal structure of the grayscale data, which has changed. Unless you are bypassing the API functions to directly set the grayscale values with memcpy (like the rgb-pov example does) this should not affect you. The code in rgb-pov/software/ that turns a PNG file into a data.c file has been updated to generate files that conform to this new internal format.