Home › Evil Mad Scientist Forums › LED Matrix Kits › I need some peggy advice please. › Re: I need some peggy advice please.
February 26, 2013 at 3:18 pm
#21181
Windell Oskay
Keymaster
The Peggy 2 (or 2LE) can do it, but it is indeed overkill. Probably the most straightforward way to use it would be to wire up 6 rows rows of 10 LEDs each, meaning that you’d need to run a total of 16 wires to the Peggy.
The Peggy 2 is 11.320×14.875″ in overall size:
http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/75-peggy2
You might prefer to use the Peggy 2LE instead, as it is smaller (9.625×5.9″) and lower in cost:
http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/157
The Peggy 2 comes with a 3xD battery holder. One can be added separately to the Peggy 2LE as well: http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/partsmenu/552
I’d estimate battery lifetime under this set of circumstances as about 150-250 hours if the LEDs are on all of the time, and 2-5 times that if the LEDs are flashing intermittently. I’d certainly recommend turning it off when not needed or (much better) using a plug-in power supply.
Since you don’t need all that many LEDs, and they don’t need to be on all the time, you might consider using Charlieplexing, directly from a microcontroller, to drive the LEDs instead. For 60 LEDs, you could do this with a microcontroller board like our Diavolino, using 9 digital output lines to drive a hand-wired matrix. For a bit more about Charlieplexing, see our article about how the Bulbdial Clock works: