Okay, so here's what I'm trying to do...
I want to drive some high power LEDs. To do this, I have selected the following constant current LED driver:
http://www.diodes.com/_files/datasheets/BCR420UW6_BCR421UW6.pdfI also want to be able to adjust the brightness of these LEDs. But I don't want to PWM them directly with my microcontroller pins. I want to control them at a distance using I2C.
I looked around for an I2C I/O expanders which could do PWM and I didn't find much.
The only thing I found that might work (because it defaults to low, not high when it powers up) was this, but they're $2 each, there's only a few thousand available so there's a danger of them going out of stock, and the chip's rather large since it has 16 outputs: (I only need like 5 or 6 for the high powered LEDs)
http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/PCA9685.pdfBut I had an idea. I have some other 5mm LEDs in the same location I also want to animate along with the high power LEDs. And I only need to drive like 7 of those. So maybe I could use the same 16 LED constant current driver I will be using elsewhere to drive the 7 5mm leds and provide a PWM signal to the 6 high powered led drivers?
http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tlc59116.pdfThere's just one problem though. On power up, this driver will go high. That would turn on my high power LED drivers. I could turn them off right away, but I don't want those to flash at all when I apply power initially.
Then I thought, what if I use an inverter? And I found this inverter array with six outputs, which can push and pull 12ma:
http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/sn74lv14a.pdf So my question is, do you think this will work? My main concerns here are:
1. Whether the inverter can supply sufficient current to the transistor. I assume the answer is yes.
2. Whether the inverter can handle the frequency at which the LED driver will be doing PWM. (I think this is 25Mhz?)
3. Whether the transistor in the high power LED driver can handle the frequency at which the LED driver will be doing PWM at that 12mA drive current.