Here is just about everything you could ever want to know about the design and construction of the Hotpants board, except for a circuit schematic, which does not exist.

Hardware Theory

The whole circuit is controlled by a PIC 16F876 microcontroller running at 20 MHz. It has 22 usable I/O pins. We are using it to drive four 5 X 7 LED arrays. The LED elements in the arrays are referenced by row and column, so we do not have simultaneous unique access to each one. Basically what we have to do is turn on one column at a time and light each row that is on in that column. Then quickly switch to the next column, and so on. That means that each column is only lit for a fraction of its possible time. This is sad, as it cuts down on brightness, but unavoidable. We do, however, play one nice trick, which is to treat the four arrays as two tall columns rather than one large array. That way we can control each LED while keeping the columns lit 1/5 of the time rather than 1/10, effectively doubling the brightness. (I know could be explaining this better, but print out the data sheets and have a look at the code, and I think it'll make sense.)

Unfortunately, that means that we have to control two columns of 14 LEDs independently. So with 10 columns and 28 effective rows, we are saddled with a burden of 38 outputs, which we know the PIC can't provide by itself. So we use shift registers. Shift registers turn serial outputs parallel by piping clocked values to their output pins on a specific signal. So we hook up 4 shift registers in series, and end up with 32 extra outputs controlled by 3 pins on the PIC (data, clock, and output enable).

Finally we have a potential problem with constant brightness. We want all of the LEDs to be equally bright, but the PIC has a limited ability to sink or source current, which means that when it's lighting 14 LEDs at once, they'll be dim, and when it's lighting one, it'll be bright. So we run the PIC column outputs through a Darlington current source chip to give it muscle.

Construction tips

The silkscreen layer is your friend. Use it as a guide. Even if you produce the board without a silkscreen layer, print it out and use it. It will tell you the direction each of your chips should face. Don't solder them in the wrong direction. I've done it countless times, and the orientations are not intuitive. Also note that the LED arrays are soldered on the back of the board, which is weird. There will be one side of each LED array with some text written on it. That must face down toward the header at the bottom of the board. Otherwise it's pretty much straightforward. I would recommend socketing your PIC so you can burn it in a burner when necessary. If you don't socket it, be sure your bootloader is burned on before you solder it to the board.

That's it for the hardware. The rest is software.

Software Theory

There are several different incarnations of software for Hotpants because it has been used in a bunch of different contexts. All of the software for Hotpants to date has two components, one on a PC and one on the board. A system by Megan Galbraith allows you to write programs in the Nylon language and send them to Hotpants. A setup by Simon Greenwold lets you take movies with a webcam and send them to the board. The software on the PC side is different, and so is the firmware on the PIC. It is helpful to burn a bootloader onto the PIC ahead of time so that you can download different programs to it to change its functionality.

The basic operation of the firmware on the PIC is to change the values in the display buffer over time. That becomes an animation. The actual refresh of the screen column by column is done by timed interrupt, so it remains consistent no matter what else is going on on the PIC.

We get three pixel levels (ON, HALF-ON, OFF) by using two alternated screen buffers. A pixel that is half brightness is on in one buffer and off in the other. That way it gets half duty cycle. (Actually it only gets 1/3 duty cycle because we display the second buffer two times out of three. That was just because it made the contrast between all-on and half-on better.)

Tools

The tools you should collect in order to play with the Hotpants as set up are

PIC Programmer (like PICSTART Plus)
Necessary if you want to build a Hotpants from scratch. You will need this to burn a bootloader on the PIC. With luck that's the only time you'll need to use it. So maybe you can borrow someone else's. They are more expensive than they need to be ($100 or so).

PIC C Compiler
We recommend and use CCSC. It's relatively cheap ($125), and it works. If you're the assembler type, good for you. Forgo the compiler. But don't waste your time with the free compilers unless you have a lot of extra time you don't know what to do with.

PIC Bootloader
I would recommend using the same bootloader we used for compatibility. It's by Petr Kolomaznik and Shane Tolmie, and is available free from www.microchipc.com. You'll need to make a serial converter cable to use it, which is not detailed in the discussion or arts list below, but is described on their site.

The PIC's serial pins are exposed from the board as the last two header pins on the right (after power and ground) as seen in the schematic below. Which is which, I forget, but it's easy to discover from the PIC datasheet or trial and error.

Circuit Board
I love ExpressPCB. They are cheap, fast, and great. The file below is an ExpressPCB layout files. It will open in the free software available from them. You can send them the design directly and they will send you back a beautiful circuit board. No hassle. Their new schematic software is very good too. If it had existed when we developed Hotpants, I'd be able to offer you a circuit schematic too.

Download: HotpantsR4.pcb

Parts

All of the parts and associated data sheets for Hotpants are available from Digikey except for the LED arrays, which come from Jameco.

The total component cost should be roughly $18.

Software

PIC side
The packages you'll see here have a .c file, which is C source to be compiled with CCSC, a .lst file, which is a listing of the compiled code, and a .hex file, which is the compiled code in a non-human-readable format, but ready to download to the PIC with PICLoader (see below) or burn on with a PIC programmer.

LittleVision.zip LittleVision is the PIC side code needed to run movies made with CompressMovie or VideoMaker (see below). You must burn this on first to have those movies work. If this program gets overwritten, write it again. Scroller.zip Scroller is a little program for Hotpants that lets you scroll text messages across the screen. An easy starter program because it doesn't require any other steps. Note that if you burn this on, you'll need to reload LittleVision if you want to go back to showing movies.

PC side

PICLoader.zip This is the PC-side software for sending .hex files to the PIC. The syntax is "picloader.exe -PCOM1 yourFile.hex", where -P is optional and specifies the name of the serial port. CompressMovie.zip CompressMovie makes downloadable movie files from a series of images. You must prepare the board by downloading LittleVision first. Usage details are in README.txt. Full source is included. VideoMaker.zip This program burns movies taken with a webcam to the Hotpants board. It is basically like CompressMovie attached to a video capture program. I'm making available a weird combination of binaries and source because I'm not free to release certain parts of the source (even if you ask nicely). The source that I can give you is the stuff that pertains specifically to this project, so that should be helpful. The binaries here should run on pretty much any PC with a video capture device attached. You must prepare the board by downloading LittleVision first. Nylon4Hotpants.zip This program by Megan Galbraith allows you to write graphics routines for the Hotpants board using the Nylon language, a subset of Java augmented with tiny graphics library. The environment lets you preview and debug your programs before sending them to the board. It is written in Java but runs only on Windows PCs because of the program downloader. This program also requires you to have installed the CCSC compiler (see above), and added the executable to your path. Note that if you burn this on, you'll need to reload LittleVision if you want to go back to showing movies.