wow what a labor intensive undertaking!
I can see digital dance floors being popular for entertainment venues, but isn't there already commerically available products out there? (512 channel DMX based systems)
I didn't read every single line of that blog, but from the gist of it, it looks like each LED is on the end of a terribly long piece of cable? and all these cables connect to the driver boards, and the driver boards connect together somehow with the computer?
the phyiscal arrangement is of smaller tiles assembled into larger panels which are assembled into a 'dance floor'?
the led driver they're using has 16 channels, but only 4 bits of resolution (16 shades) per channel, and another 4 bits of global 'brightness'... so 4096 colors at 256 brightness levels
I'm not an engineer (but I play one on the interweb), and this is just some idle speculation; but I would have given each tile a dedicated processor. Using PIC chips with three 10-bit pwm ports would give each tile billions of colors. The specific pic I have in in mind (the 16f737) supports a number of addressable bus options, I2C, SPI or RS485... spi would be ideal, since it has several megabits of bandwidth and a ton of address space... only using three wires. a wired array using spi should be easy, using mating connectors, you only need to have 5 signals pass between each tile (sdc, sdo, sdi, vdd ,vss). each tile could have one male and three female connectors , one for each side obvisouly.
alternately one could use the i2c or spi hardware to connect to something like a blue stamp or other wireless gateway chip, eliminate the need for any wiring by adding a few flat-pack glass-mat sla's or some lipo cells. each tile would be programmed with an address (set by jumpers or some other means) and could be wirelessly formed into an array, limited only by the addressing scheme and of course, the physical room available... all this would only require a little more work for the host PC in the communications department. to save money on the wireless radio department, groups of tiles could share a single radio, the pic attached to the radio would pass along data it received to other pics in its group. batteries could be shared this way as well, since leds aren't exactly power hungry devices.
just some ramblins
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