The title above should be said as Gene Wilder did in Young Frankenstein.

Howdy kids! I have good news to report regarding the programming of my LED sign project. :)

The folks at EvilMadScientist.com and LadyAda.net teamed up to help me resolve the issue I was having with my USBTinyISP programmer, and it’s now working perfectly. If I understand it right, the 1.5K resistors were not allowing enough voltage to go to the buffer chip. I removed them (R6 and R7) and replaced them with wires:

USBTinyISP Hack

After I did that, it worked great. I then took some code that “bbum” posted on the EvilMadScientist.com boards (thanks!), and modified it to alternate rows 16 and 17 to get my 2 frame animation as follows:

lightLine24(lineDuration);
lightLine23(lineDuration);

if (RowOnCount++ < 75) {

     // frame 1 animation
     lightLine16(lineDuration);

     //lines below say "EAT ME"....makes them flash on and off with the animation
     lightLine22(lineDuration);
     lightLine21(lineDuration);
     lightLine20(lineDuration);
     lightLine19(lineDuration);
     lightLine18(lineDuration);

} else if (RowOnCount < 150) {
     // frame 2 animation
     lightLine17(lineDuration);
} else {
     RowOnCount = 0;
}

lightLine15(lineDuration);
lightLine14(lineDuration);
lightLine13(lineDuration);
lightLine12(lineDuration);
lightLine11(lineDuration);
lightLine10(lineDuration);
lightLine9(lineDuration);
lightLine8(lineDuration);
lightLine7(lineDuration);
lightLine6(lineDuration);
lightLine5(lineDuration);
lightLine4(lineDuration);
lightLine3(lineDuration);
lightLine2(lineDuration);
lightLine1(lineDuration);
lightLine0(lineDuration);

You can download the full source code for this here.

Here’s a new video of the sign:

As you can see, I decided to flash the “EAT ME” text in sync with the animation. Here’s a pic of the sign as it looks standing in the arcade:

Pac-Man Ghost LED Sign

I feel like making another one now. :)