IKEA Frekvens LED panel hacking - preview

The IKEA FREKVENS LED panel looks neat and is very bright, but the built-in functionality is somewhat limited - just a bunch of static bitmap stacks advancing whenever there's sound present.

The 256 LEDs are driven with 16 shift registers each operating 16 pixels. The signal protocol is a basic 3-wire latch-clock-data thing with 3V logic levels and leading edge pulses. The enable line is inverted logic and can be PWM driven for dimming control. You can trivially rip out the controller board and put in a small microprocessor such as a Teensy or a Feather type Arduino compatible and drive the LED shift registers from your own software.

I've written a FREKVENS Arduino library compatible with the Adafruit GFX library. I'll upload it to Github over the weekend and do a project writeup, after I finish writing some optimized routines for some of the graphics primitives. Bitmap drawing, line drawing, all the basic stuff works.

Happy hacking.

[Henry-iqrs]

Great ! I had exactly the same idea but I have very little knowledge. I can't wait to know the details of your work.

[CommodoreCrush]

This is great. Wish I understood how to do it myself.

[EvokeArt]

Very nice! Any luck with connecting the mic up to the Teensy?

[ftwo]

That's a great hack! Are the LEDs dimmable?
For some time now I am looking for a way to make a 128px LED grid to display pictures taken with a Nintendo Gameboy Camera.

[TheTNTarmy]

could you send a link where you upload it?

[BrandonKlevence]

Maybe quick Q, is it possible to scroll text across 2 of them?

[federicogramolini]

Is it possible to change LEDS when they stop to work?

[soufathekiller]

what spi mode does ut use and what is max speed

[jerzyszyjkowski]

Thanks a lot for this super helpful library! I made it work with Arduino Nano without logic shifters! By the way - how do you control the big scale graphics (such us the IKEA text etc.)? Again - thanks a lot - this is amazing work!! Helped me to recover from disappointment with original bitmap graphics on Frekvens..