Interfacing High power LED Driver and PC with MATLAB?

[abhaymv]

Hey all!

I'm driving a string of high power LEDs (~700 mA) using an HV9910 LED Driver.

http://www.premier-electric.com/files/supertex/pdf/hv9910.pdf

The output current of HV9910 (and hence LED intensity) is controllable by an input PWM_D of the LED Driver. PWM_D pin needs an external PWM input whose duty cycle controls the LED intensity.

Can I use MATLAB to generate a PWM waveform and use one of the ports in my Laptop (USB/Ethernet/Audio) to send this waveform to the LED driver? I saw somewhere that computer ports do not support the bandwidth required for PWM signals. But can't I just send a sequence of binary data as PWM? Eg:

11000000 for a duty cycle of 1/4?

I'm a newbie when it comes to interfacing. Thus please forgive anything idiotic I may have said here.

[Skimask]

Part 3

I'm a newbie when it comes to interfacing. Thus please forgive anything idiotic I may have said here.

Part 4

I saw somewhere that computer ports do not support the bandwidth required for PWM signals. But can't I just send a sequence of binary data as PWM?

[c4757p]

Option one: just try it!

Option two: tiny microcontroller listening over a serial interface/USB to generate the PWM signal.

[AndrejaKo]

I see two ways to do this:
The "good" one would be to get a microcontroller, have it create the PWM and then send commands to it  from say Matlab or whatever you want to.

The other option would the to simply connect the audio output to the input pin and hope for the best.  If the PWM frequency should be in the range computer sound card can support, then you can create appropriate sound. Matlab should be capable of creating required sound and playing it. Another option would be to just make a fixed square wave with some for example audacity just to test if thins will work fine.

[abhaymv]

Thank you everyone!

So I was thinking a microcontroller or a signal generator for the PWM needs. That takes care of output data.

Now I need to receive three sets of data from the sensors. And all this needs to be done at the same time...

I'm thinking a USB to Serial port and a MUX/DEMUX arrangement. Serial data is demultiplexed to two channels of Signal generator. Data from various sensors are multiplexed and sent as serial data. Would that work? I'd need info from an 860 samples/sec 16 bit ADC each for all the sensors.