Hardware description

A MB Led block includes multiples components. The microprocessor is an STM32F103RET6 with 512Kb of Flash and 64 Kb of RAM.

Blocks communicates with each other by infrared : They have 4 IrDA transceivers to send packets to their neighbor. We configured the IrDA to send very powerless signals so that messages are sent only to the neighbor, thus avoiding interference in transmissions due to other blocks in the network. In to avoid packet’s losses an acknowledgement function and a checksum have been implemented.

The LED driver is a TLC5951 and allow 24 bit/pixel. With this driver, we can display thousands of different colors on the blocks and colors are very beautiful.
There is also a SD Card reader (that you can see on the left picture). We thought people want to have games and animation and the flash memory is limited (512 Kb). In the future, people will put some games on the SD Card. We didn’t have any time left to implement it but it would be a nice feature.

Here, you can see the PCB of the MB Led :
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