In-vehicle display system

Abstract

The design of an invehicle textual display system based on a matrix of light emitting diodes was achieved within this project. The concept of an illuminated display was researched, designed and developed into a working prototype. The prototype of the display consists of eleven display sections, each consisting of a 5x7 LED matrix. The design allows these modular sections to be added or removed to vary the length of the display required. The research into existing LED displays revealed a number of equally suited products was available, however, the goal of the project was the creation of an original design that could be manufactured into a new product in the future. The display is controlled by a PIC microcontroller that outputs serial data to a series of cascaded serial-in parallel-out shift registers. The shift registers convert the stream of serial data to a parallel sequence used to scan each line of the display. A handheld programmer is incorporated in the design and is used to create messages for the display. The programmer is based around a mobile phone layout using an alphanumeric keypad and multi-tap typing to enter each character.