You can still use eagle... Just make one PCB for the controller, and then you could make a single PCB for each of your own 7-segment RGB displays. Or if that's not big enough, you won't even need a real PCB for 7 LED's, prototyping boards will just do fine.
You know, I was thinking that myself. I'm starting to draw out the LED pattern in the program I used to make the picture in my first post, so I can see how big a 4 digit clock display will be. If I can't fit the entire thing in 4", then I can maybe just split it up into 2 boards. The only problem at that point, is that those will all be separate boards, and most cheap PCB makers charge you by the board, up to a certain size, so I would need some way to take all my Gerber files and put them onto one large board with mouse bites and outline routing...although I'm not sure a lot of those cheap PCB places will allow you to do that type of thing. On another note, does anyone know if someone makes LED modules that have some LEDs within it to make like a bar that could be used to construct a 7 segment display? It's kind of hard to describe, but if there was a bar that was like 1" by 1/8" or 1/4", it might be cool to make the displays out of those, providing they made RGB versions. I even thought, since the LEDs would be on another board, I could use a master/slave PIC, and have them communicate over SPI or I^2C...which would limit my connections between the driver board and the display board. Has anyone done any work with a USB based PIC? I talked with someone at work about it, and they said it was a pain, and in some of his designs, he just used an Ethernet connection instead. I'm not sure I want to write a driver for this thing...but being able to do some things with it over USB would be cool. I had thought about putting a 40x1 character display at the bottom of the clock, and using it to scroll information, and using it for clock setup and what not. It would be cool to get it to work with something like LCD Smartie, but still allow the PIC to control the display when it needed to...
Interesting, this place sells dual color 7 segment displays...they also say additional segment colors are available at no additional cost. http://www.ledopto.com/prod/table_of_contents.htm I wonder if they can add blue, to make an RGB display? I'll have to contact them and see.
i think i want to make this clock. but i prefer the 7 segment as display not led. but i wanna know. should you program the IC?
I have no experience with USB based on PICs, but USB in general isn't too bad once you get the basics down. I can't speak for writing drivers though. If you don't need a high data transfer rate, you can do everything through your device's endpoint 0. This should streamline the design. And the driver examples out there should be pretty simple to adapt for such a simple device. I've posted some useful info on USB in the past that may be helpful as well.
Great, I'll look around, and see what I can find. Currently, I've switched back to using a 16F877A right now, which doesn't have USB...We'll see how the project goes.
oh, ok. i still dont know how you guys program the PIC. next year i will learn microcontroller subject, there i will learn to program the IC, at that moment i will make this clock . but i have see the program that my seniors used to program the IC. .
Sparkfun has RGB dot matrix displays. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=683
There are a few ways it can be done. An ICSP programmer can program your PIC while it's in the target application, or you can use a chip programmer, where you will have to transfer the programmed chip to your target application after programming.
