Driving a LED panel of size 64*22 (1408 SMD LEDs of 0603 size)

[DodZi]

Hi all!
I believe myself to be in love with LEDs and recently decided to build a project with a LOT of LEDs. Hence a LED panel of 64*22 red LEDs.
But soon I realized that to control these LEDs, multiple options lie before me. These would be :

• Breaking the panel into small parts and controlling each part with a separate controller. And then all these controllers will communicate with a host controller (Probably thinking of TI's TM4C123G for host uC and MSP430 28 pin for LED controlling part. Suggestions for this too?)
• Second is to use LED drivers, which I have never used and hence not able to choose as my first choice.

Can anyone please let me know if I have missed any other option for driving these LEDs? Also which could be the best-suited method for the same?

[Rerouter]

You have a nice byte aligned sized array, It will come down to your refresh rate a little, and if you need brightness control.

LED driver IC's greatly reduce the amount of middle management you would otherwise have to do, e.g. writing the brightness values directly, but may blow out yur BOM price,

If you do go the microcontroller path, Refresh rate and brightness dimming are the deciders, because going this road will likely result in shift registers, If you just need global brightness, this is easy as its just PWM'ing the output enable pin, If you want localised dimming, you will need to push out a new serial string for each PWM value, this has a limit based on how fast your micro can push this data out, deciding how many strings you break it into.

You can cheat this a little if your micro has a wider I/O bit size, e.g. a 32 bit micro if it has all 32 lines exposed can update 32 shift registers data in 2 clock cycles, 1 to write the 32 bit word, 1 to pulse the data clock. However your micro will be burning time calculating the next PWM state, and reading in the next frame,