Blinky LED Bars and LM3914N LED Bar Driver!
So @JohnS_AZ a good friend of ours sent me this awesome package of goodies way back when and the LED bar from it has been staring at me for quite some time. Thought I'd dig it out from the project box and see whether I could get any blinky LED action going.
The Yellow LED Bar is MV53164 and according to the package is a 10 segment bar graph display with separate anodes and cathodes for each light segment. It's highlighted red below and is essentially a whole bunch of LEDs in a row. The point of a led bar however, is not just so that you can use it like other leds. This package enables you to have a clean method of illustrating levels - like audio levels, or power levels, etc.
Let's take a closer look at the display driver, LM3914N. It basically allows for the sensing of voltage levels and translates that information to the LEDs for a linear display.
The internals of the driver remind me quite a bit of ADCs in that it has a whole bunch of voltage comparators (opamp action) and a resistor voltage divider tree attached to it. So the resistor tree is connected to ground and the reference power rail.
The signal goes into an op-amp and through feedback mechanisms becomes the signal that is compared to the voltage dividing tree's reference voltages.
Cool. Now actually time to make it work! The follow schematic is what I'll be using.
@atdiy/@tymkrs