If you’re the proud owner of a recent MacBook Pro and you have an iPhone with the latest iOS installed, then you’ll be familiar with a prompt on your MacBook screen asking if you want your iPhone to act as a webcam for your MacBook. I do not want that “feature.”
You’d think you could find and put a stop to that continual aggravation in your macOS Settings, but you’d be wrong. Instead it’s on your iPhone, a new feature Apple snuck into an iOS update while you weren’t looking.
If you’re tired of having to bat that damn macOS dialog away every time it appears, then go into your iPhone’s Settings, select General, then select Airplay & Handoff. Third toggle down is Continuity Camera. Mine was enabled be default. Opt out of that crap by sliding it to off.
Note the bottom toggle; the latest iOS allows you to share Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro content on your iPhone. I can’t wait.
It bothered me quite a bit that my last few schematic diagrams were missing the 8×8 LED matrix display. As it turns out, the part number for the 8×8 LED display is printed on the side: 1088AC. When I went looking for any part sheets for it, all I found was a single page with this printed on it
1088AS schematic diagram
It was a PDF with a copy of a copy of the circuit diagram. I could barely make out the column, row, and physical pin numbers. I then went looking for an open source KiCad part for the 1088AC and found one on GitHub, which I forked and then cloned from my fork. I was able to quickly ascertain that the part was designed for KiCad 6. From there I used KiCad’s part library manager to import the part and then convert to KiCad 7 format. I had to do a bit more work with it before I could use it. For example, all the LED symbols were reversed, pointing up (as common anode) instead of down (common cathode). A little work to select and flip each diode symbol took care of that. I also change all the row pins from input to output, as they were all defined as input.
I am aiming to order a dozen or so MAX7221 parts from e-bay. The MAX7221 has a few additions internally over the MAX7219, one of which is that it support QSPI format data communications. Same price as the MAX2719, same pinout.
MAX7219/MAX7221
What’s interesting about the MAX7219/MAX7221 part sheet, it mentioned on the front page that it was suitable for LED matrix displays, but all the circuit diagram examples only show seven-segment by eight character displays, such as the one on the right above.
More learned with KiCad 7; better control with the schematic diagram, the ability to import parts, and the ability to convert from KiCad 6 to KiCad 7. When I’m finished with the 1088AC KiCad drawing part I’ll update my GitHub version and post a link to it in another post.
Radarwitch
You must be logged in to post a comment.