Greetings!

I am brand new - as in, never built a circuit of my own ever - to electronics but so far I am incredibly excited to be taking on my current challenge. I am working on building a Word Clock partly because I find them to be incredibly cool, but also because they only appear to be of moderate difficulty and help to introduce me to both: circuit design (optional I guess) and microprocessors.

Having said that, I am using diptrace to construct a schematic for power distribution at the moment. I realize that what I've uploaded isn't much of a circuit yet but it's the foundation from which most things in my circuit will run and for that reason, I would really appreciate anyone that could look it over and make sure (primarily) that +5v will in fact arrive on the jumper pads as planned.

The "LED Board" (of which there will be four) is another PCB that I will build that will each house an 8x8 LED matrix, for a 16x16 matrix in the end. I do realize that each LED board having it's own voltage regulator is probably overkill but I happen to have them and I think this will greatly reduce any heat concerns. I also just realized while typing this that I am short one regulator on the board since there are four LED boards and I need to power the main board (Atmega328, DS3231 RTC, etc.).

Anyway, constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated.

 

Your schematic makes sense, but math beats guessing, any day. You should count up how many LEDs will be on at any one time and figure your regulator needs from that.

 

Thank you, I figure the best way is to mount this stuff on a breadboard as I go for real-time results and measuring. I'm just waiting for some of it to ship and a little to excited to see things work I guess. Your comment helps though, in fact, that is going to be a challenge in itself for me. The MAX7219 uses multiplexing which is quite intimidating at this stage but from what I've read so far, using this technique I will never need to account for all 256 lights being on at once (or 64 per board).

Thank you!