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Font editing for LED matrix

Posted: Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:31 am
by Janke
I don't know if anyone plans to build a LED matrix display like the ones I've built, but here's a font displaying program including the 3 fonts I've designed (well, the first is actually from an Arduino website, with just a few small changes.)

This BASIC code will run without any extra hardware whatsoever, just plug the EzSBC1 to your computer via USB, and run the code in your terminal program. Note that the display will be correct only if the terminal uses a monospaced font, such as Courier.

Note that I have used some of the more unusual character positions in the ASCII table for our Scandinavian diacriticals ÅÄÖåäö and for some special signs I need...

It's easy to make changes; just search the DIM statements for the hex value for a particular character (always compare with the surrounding values since there are many duplicates), and then change it. It helps if you have some graph paper to sketch the character you want, then convert it to hex. MSB is at bottom, LSB at top. The small alphabet uses 8 bits, the large ones use 16 bits for each vertical LED column in a character.

If you change the width of a character, remember to change the index, too, in the following DIM statement. There is a one-pixel "reserve" since I've included an empty column between all characters. The printout shows both the index (decimal) and the hex value in front of the characters.

Hoping you enjoy just looking at the printout, even if you never build a LED matrix yourself!