cableman / frekvenspanel

Arduino library for playing with IKEA Frekvens LED panel

This is a first rough cut of an Arduino library for the IKEA FREKVENS LED panels developed jointly with Teenage Engineering.

Contributions welcome.

Arduino requirements: Must be type with 3.3V logic levels. If you want to try hooking this up through 8-bit 5V AVR antiques like an Arduino Uno, then you must use level shifters.

Recommendation: Use Teensy 3+, Adafruit Feather M0 or Sparkfun SAMD21 mini breakouts. Should also work with 32U4 based boards as well, so long as they're 3.3V. Haven't tried with ESP8266 yet.

Library dependencies:

• Adafruit GFX library must be installed.

Soldering instructions:

• Open & disassemble the LED cube.

• Extract the mainboard.

• Desolder the original controller daughterboard (green color).

  • Use flux and solder wick.

• Attach wires to the six solder points.

  • The outermost solder points are marked VCC and GND.

  • Let GND be (1) and VCC be (6). The middle four are as follows:

  • (2) LATCH - connect to a digital output pin.

  • (3) CLOCK - connect to a digital output pin.

  • (4) DATA - connect to a digital output pin.

  • (5) !ENABLE. This one is optional. If you DON'T need to be able to control brightness of the display, then just solder a wire from this pin to GND. If you DO want to control brightness, then connect this pin to a PWM ("analog") output pin on your Arduino.

  • Solder the GND wire to a GND pin on the Arduino.

  • Leave the VCC wire unconnected until you're done programming

  • The VCC wire has 4 volts on it coming from the isolated power

  • supply of the Frekvens cube.

  • While programming, the Arduino should be powered through USB.

  • After programming, disconnect USB cable and attach VCC wire

  • from Frekvens panel to battery input or "USB" voltage pin on

  • the Arduino. The Frekvens panel will now supply the Arduino

  • board voltages.

• Optionally - hook up the red and yellow buttons on the back.

  • RED wire is common so connect this to GND or VCC of the
  • Arduino. BLACK wire is RED button, WHITE wire is YELLOW button.

• Put the whole thing back together.

• To use the library, add #include "Frekvenspanel.h" statement, and instantiate a FrekvensPanel object. See examples.

• Library has several un-documented experimental modes, including multiple bit planes (intensity dithering) and support for daisy- chaining several modules. Needs more work. At the moment the daisy- chain is mapped vertically which seems wrong.

• Happy hacking