Control LED's with VB from serial port

Thread Starter

fletcher_ap

Joined Feb 12, 2010
1
Hello everybody. I am looking for a little guidance on a project I am working on. I can do the coding but my electronics knowledge is somewhat limited. I would like to control approximately 50 LED lights individually but mounted in different locations. Basically, I would have a screen with 50 small buttons labeled 1 - 50. I will push one and then that LED will illuminate while others are unaffected. My question is what hardware I should use? I can pick the LED's, resistors, etc, no problem. Obviously a serial connector soldered to:

what kind of board?
what comes after the serial connection (Microcontroller?)

I would assume something to process the address of LED location...

If anybody can show me a diagram or suggest some hardware, I surely would appreciate it.

Thanks,
 

ELECTRONERD

Joined May 26, 2009
1,147
The BASIC Stamp will accomplish what you need. Go to http://www.parallax.com/ and search for the various stamps. You can purchase a dev board already constructed, but it will cost you more than if you just buy the stamp and make your own dev board. You can use the following commands:

PULSOUT
HIGH/LOW
TOGGLE

Examples:

Rich (BB code):
PULSOUT 2, 65535
PAUSE 1000
Rich (BB code):
HIGH 2
PAUSE 1000
LOW 2
PAUSE 1000
Rich (BB code):
TOGGLE 2
PAUSE 1000
Note that this is simply using the BASIC language, and not VB. I'm not entirely sure if you can use those commands with VB.

Austin
 

symqwerty

Joined Feb 22, 2010
31
Since you need to control 50 LEDs, you need something to decode the instruction to enable/disable the LED. Yes, of course you need microcontroller because you need to decode instruction from your PC.

You can have MCU with higher pin count or just buy a cheap MCU(with UART and SPI are compulsory) and shift registers and then use daisy-chain method to control the LEDs.

It's easy to control this from PC using serial port but i think you know it already.
 

Taral

Joined Nov 3, 2014
1
You can have a denk
Hello everybody. I am looking for a little guidance on a project I am working on. I can do the coding but my electronics knowledge is somewhat limited. I would like to control approximately 50 LED lights individually but mounted in different locations. Basically, I would have a screen with 50 small buttons labeled 1 - 50. I will push one and then that LED will illuminate while others are unaffected. My question is what hardware I should use? I can pick the LED's, resistors, etc, no problem. Obviously a serial connector soldered to:

what kind of board?
what comes after the serial connection (Microcontroller?)

I would assume something to process the address of LED location...

If anybody can show me a diagram or suggest some hardware, I surely would appreciate it.

Thanks,
You can have a simple demo here to send data from vb to serial port..later on you can use 8051 or pic microcontroller board to decode it on hardware for leds.
http://embeddedtweaks.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/accessing-pc-serial-port-in-visual-basic/
 
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