Plugging it together#

The chain#

Every board — the main module and every tile — has two identical connectors, wired in parallel. Run a cable from one board to the next in any order you like:

main module ──── mx9 ──── mx9 ──── enc2

• Order does not matter.
• Both connectors on a board are the same. There is no “in” and no “out”.
• Cables are straight through. Pin 1 to pin 1. There is no crossover cable in this system.
• Up to 31 tiles, and up to about 4 m of cable in total.

Splitting the chain#

A splitter is a small square board with four connectors wired in parallel. Use one where the cable wants to go in more than one direction, for example along both sides of a panel:

main module ──── mx9 ──── splitter ──── mx9 ──── enc2
                             │
                            mx4

Tiles on a branch work exactly like tiles on the main run.

• No loops. Never cable back to a board that is already on the bus. Nothing detects a loop.
• Count the branches in the 4 m. The limit is the total of every cable on the bus.

Power#

The whole panel runs off the USB cable. There is nothing else to plug in.

The main module turns the global LED brightness down until the worst-case draw of the chain fits the USB power budget, so a panel with many LEDs runs dimmer. If you are running from a port that can supply more than the default, raise the budget in the config app. See LED colours.

Adding a tile mid-season#

Plug it into a spare connector. The main module gives it an address by itself the next time it is powered on. Nothing that was already bound changes.

Bindings are stored per tile position, not per physical board. If you swap a faulty tile for an identical one, the replacement inherits the old one’s bindings automatically. If you add a second tile of the same kind, it is a new tile and starts unbound. Binding buttons covers what to do when the board cannot tell which case it is looking at.

Cable pinout#

Six-way JST GH, 1.25 mm pitch. You only need this if you are making cables.