LED driver chips, TLC5923

Maybe The philips variants (I2C) ? PCA9532 1kpc @ $1.4

Cheers

Hello Martin,

Thanks. I like the fact that it even has two PWM. One for dimming and another for visible blinking. Smart. The only concern is that Avnet has no stock and Arrow carries very little stock. Don't know if that could be a bad sign or not. Then again Digikey has some which usually means it's popular.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Martin,

It has a caveat. Each LED need a series resistor. That kind of rules it out :-(

But thanks anyway.

Regards, Joerg

Joerg,

A bit of house tidy required here

Hello Terry,

Thanks for the hint. I did find one typo and polished it some more. Could you tell me what's wrong with it?

Regards, Joerg

copied .....

Where can Analog Consultants help?

home

by Joerg Schulze-Clewing

Difficult Analog Designs

It isn't possible to furnish all expertise in house at all times. Sometimes it doesn't even make sense to have a full time analog engineer on staff. Whatever the scenario, there often comes a point when a design becomes difficult. Going it alone at that point might lead to huge problems later, be that in production, in the field, or simply a large cost overrun. I have seen boards that unnecessarily contained numerous precision chips totaling over $1000 just in parts and they still would not work reliably. This will often require a redesign from scratch, meaning that all the engineering hours that had gone into it were basically wasted.

Other designs are just partially difficult. This could be an RF section, something that needs to provide incredible precision or maybe a disposable portion that must be realized at rock bottom cost. In that case the consultant can handle the "nasty" parts while the other engineers develop the rest. That has worked very well in the past. It also provides an opportunity for the client's engineers to learn how to handle this type of challenge next time.

Digital Designs

Analog consultants are not FPGA designers, so what should they be doing here? A lot. As soon as clock frequencies exceed 100 MHz or rise and fall times reach picosecond levels things become analog rather quickly. A minor oversight on the clock distribution, phase jitter, cross talk, unwanted transmission line behavior, all this can have effects that can drive the digital designer up the wall. The simulations show that everything should work fine but the design behaves outright weird. That can cost many work hours and throw the time schedule a real curve.

Analog consultants use tools such as oscilloscopes, analyzers and meters in different ways. They look for those subtle yet revealing signs of trouble. Bus contentions, transient pulses, runt pulses, brief bits of data

....... was that your intention

Cheers.

Hello Terry,

Oh drat. Thanks for the hint. It reads just fine with Mozilla, Netscape and an older IE. But not with a newer version IE that came with a PC and which I never used. There I got the same results that you saw. So I guess I fell victim to another one of those dreaded (intentional?) incompatibilities. Maybe I am being punished for defecting from an MS product.

I am using Mozilla Composer. Guess I'll have to look around for another option now to fix this.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Terry,

Just as a side note, I snooped around and found that IE butchers the display of other web sites in a similar fashion. Even government sites like this:

Maybe IE has a major problem. Anyway, since it's still used by many (don't know why...) I'll have to make my web site compatible. I had a hunch when I was at a client w/o my laptop and used one of their PCs to find some vendor info. They only had IE on it and several sites that I had accessed ok before with Mozilla were nearly unintelligible. Error messages, text columns mashed into each other and so on.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Terry,

Ok, tried it. Loaded that page into MS-Word which, after all, is a Microsoft product. MS-Word displayed it correctly (!). Hmm...

Anyway, I saved it again from MS-Word which miraculously increased the file size by a few hundred bytes. Oh well. Then I uploaded it to the web server and tried it. Fine with Netscape and Mozilla. IE still mangles it.

If it was me I would ditch IE.

Regards, Joerg

MSWORD, Tools->Options->Compatibility->Dont use HTML paragraph auto spacing.

Your welcome,

No, I can't do that - least problems with using it as it is the dominate browser. Also I use FrontPage Express to compile my own web site - it's fairly straight forward. I can see from my stats that over 90% of my visitors are using IE and a lot of sites are set up predominately for IE for that reason. Yeah, I know it stinks but I just go with the flow.

PS. I would think it would be easy just to use > View > Source to edit your page anyway.

Good luck.

Hello Martin,

Thanks! That did it. Still puzzled why two products, both from MS, aren't compatible.

Regards, Joerg

Hello Terry,

Martin had the solution right there. Tried it and now it works. It seems that the MS-Word defaults and IE are incompatible but I can't say that this surprises me much.

I also see in the stats that IE is still higher than others. Sometimes I have the impression that it is declining though. As for browsing I find that Mozilla is much more efficient. No pop-ups, way faster and it hardly ever hangs. A site that is IE-centric usually means that it's a vendor that I probably won't want to do business with anyway. If they can't design an efficient web site I don't expect their customer support to be much better.

Now I'll have to fix the German part of the site. Oh well. Thanks for pointing out this IE problem to me.

Regards, Joerg

Because they can, and get away with it.

Thanks, Rich

Hello Rich,

They might not realize yet how many people are beginning to defect from their products or have stopped upgrading because they ran into so much trouble after every upgrade. Besides the OS (which I have to use) the only other MS product left that I regularly use is MS-Works. That situation was different a decade ago where they made much more money off of me.

Regards, Joerg

I don't understand why Bill Gates or one of his minions hasn't yet figured out that Linux is free, and under the terms of the GNU General Public License, he could download a Linux kernel, do a rewrite of the Windoze eye candy and full-automatic operation and stuff, and sell "Microsoft Linux!" for fifty bucks or so a pop, and maybe two bucks for the OEM CD.

Oh, well - I dream.

Cheers! Rich

Hello Rich,

It is amazing how blissfully ignorant large corporations can be. For decades. Remember when the big three in Detroit laughed off the JPN competition as "tonka toys"? Well, they ain't laughing no more.

Regards, Joerg