I shudder at the thought of soldering up this Surface Mount LED Array from bear24rw. Have a look at the build, the circuit board was designed and etched by hand and the picture documentation is very good. These are the same guys that made the RFID Doorm Room Unlocker.
Thanks Max.
"The driver we choose to design was highly inspired from this one. The basic idea is that you use shift registers to sink the columns and a line driver of some sort to source the rows (we chose to use a Darlington array).
There where a lot of changes from the Instructables design that that we had to make however. The matrix in the Instructables was a lot smaller than ours and used 8 IO lines to drive each row. Since our matrix has 16 rows this was completely infeasible using just an ATMega168. To solve this issue we choose to use a 4:16 de-mux to control all sixteen rows with only 4 IO pins."
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complex one