RGB Color Shifter Known as Shift Brite

Overview

The Shift Brite project utilizes a simple clocked serial interface to receive a 10bit brightness value for each color to produce over a billion possible colors while containing high brightness LED module that has red, green, and blue elements.

Explanation

Each Shift Brite is allowed to repeat the signal to the next by having each input buffered and output on the other side of the module. This allows running longer cable between elements without excessive loading of microcontroller I/O pins. The current control and automatic over temperature control where an overheating channel driver will shut off until it has cooled, are being featured by the Shift Brite. If close brightness matching is necessary for fine tuning of each LED, each channel can be adjusted with a separate current control register.

The internal logic is powered by the integrated voltage regulator that allows a single 5V to 9V supply rail to power the Shift Brite chain. A simple clock, data, or latch format is used by the Shift Brite modules to receive data. A logic level is placed on the data pin, the clock pin is pulsed, and move to next data bit.