Back in April 2016 I posted details on how a Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) works and a method of driving it from an Arduino type microcontroller using transistors, while this worked well it made for a rather bulky clock. I have now rebuilt the display using proper VFD driver chips, added a rotary switch with LED’s, NeoPixel capability and used a WeMos D1 Mini microcontroller to give me internet access over WiFi so the time and date can be set using the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

This rebuild is much more practical than previously, it is now about 3cm deep and comprises of two boards back to back with pin header plugs/sockets as the interconnects. I have been running the clock for over a year without any problems, apart from having to switch the thing off and back on when Daylight Savings Time changes in the spring and autumn, but that’s a software (lazy programmer) problem.

Power Supply

Three different voltages are needed to operate this clock, 16 Volts for the VFD display anodes, 5 Volts for the microcontroller and NeoPixels and 3.3 Volts for the VFD cathode and other hardware.

From the 12 volt source, I split the power to a XL6009 boost module to supply 16V to the driver IC’s, the 5V power module can supply up to 5A which is enough for around 2 meters of NeoPixels. The 3.3V supply is created using a BA033T fixed voltage regulator running from the 5V module, I have used this to power the VFD cathode, the rotary encoder and VFD driver IC’s as this is the microcontrollers operating voltage.

Driving the Display

To drive the anodes on the VFD display I used three MAX6920 Tube Drivers, these have a four wire serial interface and can switch up to 76V on the display.

The physical connections from the driver IC’s to the VFD anodes (grids and elements, see the previous article for definition) are those that are most convenient for the PCB layout without having to use links or through-hole connections as the order of the pins for outputting the display can be mapped later in software.

In this case, the first anode pin on the display is on the right, but the serial data starts with the first MAX6920 chip on the left. I will explain in more detail in the software section below.

The Cathode is run from the 3.3 Volt supply, it has a 3.3V Zenner diode across it to protect against meltdown in case of over-voltage, the cathode is made from of strands of thin tungsten wires and shows as a short when testing in beep mode on the multimeter.

Rotary Switch

I have used the SparkFun RGB Illuminated Rotary Encoder, as well as the encoding it also includes three LED’s and a push button switch. As the WeMos only has limited number of pins available, I used an MCP23008 I²C I/O Expander. I have covered these encoders in a previous post and have used a similar method here.

In this project it turned out I don’t have much use for the rotary switch, the same result can be achieved with a push button and two LED’s, it goes red when setting the time over WiFi, goes green when the time has finished setting but is off when running normally, the push button displays the date when pushed. I expect the encoder could be used for setting an alarm should I ever have need to add one.

Software

The complete source code I am currently running in the clock can be found on my github repository, it has been written for the Arduino platform and can be considered unfinished and a bit of a mess. In almost all cases this clock will be a custom build with all the scavenged VFD displays being different I’ll be concentrating on how the display is being driven. Note that the software uses Latch and the MAX6920 driver chip uses Load.

To start, here are the physical connections for my VFD display, the display connections are shown looking from the back with pin one on the right, on the anode there are eleven grids and twenty-one elements, each grid illuminates a block of chosen elements. There are three MAX6920 driver chips, the first is on the left data is passed along the serial data line DIN/DOUT to the right:

While I’m not going to worry too much about how the data is sent to the display as this is being handled by the ShiftOutX library it may be useful to have an understanding of the byte order sent to the driver chips.

Breaking out the logic analyser we can see what is going on, in this first image below we can see that between the two markers one and two there are eleven data peaks to match the number of grids on the display the data is processed as a padded eleven character string: ‘    212848 ‘ the first four contain nothing but the bit selecting grid to be used the next six are busy as they contain the time, and the last is blank. There also appear to be two blank clock cycles after these, this may be a programming error on my part.

the string is iterated so that each grid gets its own character with a very short delay between each this causes the persistence of vision effect and the time appears on the display.

In the next screen capture I have zoomed into more detail, it is showing the fifth grid and is displaying the number two. You can see that there are thirty-two clock cycles sent to the drivers while LOAD is high, this causes the driver chips to direct the data to the outputs. I am not entirely sure why the clock is being run while LOAD is low, I think it may be clearing the buffer before sending the required information.

You can see that 32 bits are sent to the display, but there are 36 pins available on the three MAX6920 drivers, you can also see that the outputs are arranged out of order. How do the drivers know which lines to switch for the display?

First off, an explanation of how the data is constructed then sent to the display. For this example I am sending the number five to the third grid, the data is constructed through the manipulation of a character array in three stages:

Because of the way the bits are ordered when sent to the drivers I have a lookup array VFDlookup to make life easier, in this case grid 3 can be found at position 29 in the VFDdata character array. I start with a blank character array of 32 bits VFDblank and copy this to VFDdata, I then use VFDlookup to find the position of the bit to set: VFDlookup[3] = 29. For the elements the encoding for each character is set in VFDdigits the code for number 5 is 1110000110000111 the code was worked out by experimentation, seeing which element lit up after I had completed the hardware, I have ignored the extra symbols used for the DVD player so I only need to set pins 15-30. Once complete the character array is converted to a unsigned long integer and sent LSBFIRST – Least Significant Bit First via ShiftOut_32.

While that explains the elements encoding to display the correct digit, the grid selection however is a different kettle of fish. I built this clock over a year ago and have forgotten how it works. Grids 1 and 2 are connected to the output pins 1 and 0 on the third driver, pins 2-5 are then skipped, and the rest are connected to the grids, with three more being taken from chip 2. I can’t work out how it knows to skip those pins, or that grid 2 is connected to pin 1. But it is an awesome clock though.

Links and Sources

• Github Repository: https://github.com/kazzle101/vfdclock6
• WeMos D1 Mini
• SparkFun RGB Illuminated Rotary Encoder – UK Supplier
• Datasheet: MCP23008 – I/O Expander
• Datasheet: MAX6920 – Display VFD Tube Driver
• Datasheet: BA033T Fixed LDO Voltage Regulator – 3.3Volt output
• Serial to Parallel Shifting-Out with a 74HC595

Finally, I got around to videoing how I make a PCB. This one is for my Fridge Door Open alarm.

This all started with wanting to modify a cheap camping light by replacing the LED’s with some colourful NeoPixels. I made a Printed Circuit Board to match the existing PCB disc that held the LED’s, as well as a board for an ATtiny85 microcontroller which incorporated a microphone and vibrating motor of the type used in a old mobile phone. The battery and charging circuit came from a cheap (Poundland) USB powerbank but it turned out that the battery from the powerbank didn’t fit in the camping light how I liked (in a measure twice, cut once sort of thing). Instead I made this:

I wrote this back in May 2017 but it was never finished, I got distracted by other things and I needed the wireless controller for photography. I wrote all this and it would be a shame to delete it, so I am posting it now on the chance there may be of something of interest within.

I use this Yongnuo Wireless Controller in photography to control a number of flash units away from the camera body. It comes in two parts, a transmitter that connects to the hotshoe on the camera and receivers with a hotshoe that connect to the flash, a single transmitter can control any number of flash receivers within the claimed 300 meter range. The transmitter with a couple of receivers can be gotten of eBay for around £35.

Yongnuo Wireless Controller FSK 2.4GHz
RF-600TX transmitter
RF-602RX receiver

[image of transmitter and receivers]

I am looking to:

• See how the flash is connected
• Investigate how the transmitter works – reverse engineer as much as I can
• See if I can control the transmitter directly with an Arduino
• See if other devices using the same radio chip can also be controlled
• Not destroy the transmitter while examining it

Opening it up

[images of the transmitter insides]

On the board inside you will find:

• A power on/off switch
• Bi-colour Red/Green LED
• A dual-press button with two switches for operating the flash manually
• A four way code selector (4 way DIL switch)
• An anonymous (no markings) microcontroller – µC
• A7105 2.4GHz FSK/GFSK ISM band wireless transceiver

On the underside, my board is marked with the following version and date:

Version: 1.21
Date: 14/04/23  – 23 April 2014

Looking at the datasheet for the A7105 it can work as both a transmitter and receiver and uses an SPI interface for user control, it appears to be popular with the radio controlled RC aeronautical drone community. The receiver looks to be very similar by way of components, using the same radio chip and anonymous microcontroller. I have not examined it in any detail and take care if disassembling as there are three hotshoe connections that need to be desoldered.

Flash Connection

On the Canon camera the hotshoe has six connections but we only need to examine three of these. Looking down on the camera with the lens facing away from you, the main plate where the flash slides in is ground, the large central dot is the flash trigger just below this on the left is the camera ready connection. I assume the rest are for the E-TTL functions and I have not looked at these.

Checking the hotshoe with a multimeter, the flash trigger appears to have a high resistance that decreases when the flash is fired, I suppose this is a legacy of when cameras were more mechanical. The Camera Ready connection goes High – around 5 Volts,  to tell the flash to wake up, that you have pressed the shutter halfway, the lens has focused and you are about to take a photo.

To find the duration of the flash signal on the cameras hotshoe I connected an almost flat AA battery between ground and flash to give me 1.2 volts to measure against on the oscilloscope (checking a canon flash itself, the voltage across the flash pin and ground is 4.47 volts). I found that the flash signal is sent by the camera for 352ms, which is quite long considering that a typical shutter speed of 1/125 second for flash photography works out at 8ms, although the amount of time a flash fires for is set on the flash and not by this signal.

Microcontroller Connections

I spent a while tracing out most of the transmitter circuit, I have ignored most of the supporting radio circuitry and the crystal timer as I am wanting to investigate the data side. The parts are also rather small and troublesome to investigate with standard multimeter probes.

The microcontroller looks to use internal pullup resistors for the input switches, the camera ready signal from the hotshoe switches a transistor to pull pin 16 low on the controller.

Looking at the circuit diagram we see an output to the antenna from pin 8 of the micro controller. This outputs two different square waves when the shutter button is pressed, one for camera ready and another for flash. I think these are being modulated on the transmitter output to produce a radio signal and simplify the transmitter design. Looking at the output from pin eight on the oscilloscope, the two states can be seen quite clearly:

These square wave outputs are always the same, I thought it may change when a different code was chosen through the DIL switches. The transmitter unit does not receive any radio data, and no acknowledgement is made by the flash units.

Using a Logic Analyser

Time to break out the Logic Analyser, this is a cunning device that allows you to see the data being exchanged between the microcontroller and transceiver, I don’t want to get too detailed but think this may help for the following sections.

The data system being used by the A7105 is SPI. The Serial Peripheral Interface bus uses four wires: Chip Select SCS, multiple chips can be on the same SPI bus, but they all have different SCS connections, the master controller chip uses SCS to tell the slave chip it wants to use for data exchange. Serial Clock SCK: This is used to provide time synchronisation for the data exchange with a fixed duration for the highs and lows. Data SDIO: This is the data being sent by the microcontroller and GIO1 is data from the transceiver sent in reply, normally for SPI this is 8 bits, to make a byte.

The naming conventions used here are from the A7105 datasheet, The SPI bus has standard names for data lines; SDIO is MOSI – Master Out/Slave In, GIO1 would be MISO – Master In/Slave Out and SCS is SS – Slave Select. In our case the microcontroller would be the master and the transceiver the slave.

The Logic Analyser displays data in a form that allows you to see the logic, here we can see two bytes of data:

The microcontroller – µC sends data on the SDIO line and listens for replies on GIO1. When the µC sets Chip Select SCS low this tells the transceiver that the µC wants to talk to it. The µC sends a command byte followed by one or more bytes of data – a packet. During the SCS event, data is only transferred while the clock SCK is running.

We can see that the logic on the SDIO is read every-time the clock goes low, falling edge, a clock tick on the SCK line represents a bit of data, eight ticks make a byte. We now have our binary data: 00100101 for convenience this is converted into hexadecimal 0x25.

When examining an SPI bus check any available datasheets to see if the clock is set to tick on a falling or rising edge, the bit order is Most Significant Bit – MSB or Least Significant Bit – LSB, and the data length (normally eight).

Looking at the A7105 Transceiver

From the A7105 datasheet the SPI bus is set for the following:

• To activate SPI, the SCS pin must be set low
• data length: 8 bits
• bit order: Most Significant Bit First (MSB)

I have made the following connections to the transmitter. Soldering test leads to the microcontroller (µC) is the most convenient place to do this.

This table shows the Input/Output pins on the transceiver and microcontroller, as well as the colour of wire used for the logic analyser.

How the A7105 organises data

The transceiver has two data modes, Strobe and Control. There are eight strobe commands to control the various modes the chip supports, these are four bits in length and always begin with a 1, where the transceiver is being operated in 8 bit mode the final four bits are ignored. The Control registers are eight bits in length and are used to configure and read settings from the transceiver, they are eight bits in length, the first bit is always 0 and the second is either 1 for write or 0 for read. The table below shows examples of a write, a read (or more accurately a request, the transceiver replies on GIO1) and a strobe command sent by the µC.

	Address Byte									Data
Bit:	7	6	5	4	3	2	1	0		7	6	5	4	3	2	1	0
Control:	CMD	R/W	Address							Data
Write Example: 0x2 0x1	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	0		0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
Read Example: 0x42 0xff	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0		1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
Strobe:	CMD	Strobe ID			not used					not used
Example: 0xa0	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0

Examining the A7105 data

Data is exchanged on the SPI during two events, after the transmitter has been switched on, and when you are pressing the camera shutter or the button on the unit.

Power On

When you first switch on the unit, the microcontroller initialises the transceiver with a few hundred bytes of data, I have created this spreadsheet from the SPI data, hex data across is the most useful sheet to view:

In summary the initialisation sequence consists of the following

• The microcontroller sets the majority of control registers to default
• Internal calibration is started and the microcontroller keeps checking until this is done
• Final cleaning up
• Place the A7105 into standby mode

Shutter Press

On the SPI the shutter press action has two distinct stages, the preamble and the transmission. The preamble takes the camera out of standby mode and sets the channel it is going to be transmitting on. The transmission broadcasts the camera ready and flash states.

The Preamble
At the beginning of the datacaptue I see a preamble packet sent over the SPI:

This preamble looks to only appear when the flash is first operated after the transmitter unit has been switched on, subsequent use goes straight to transmit. The fifth byte changes depending on the DIL switch setting on the underside of the unit, as you can see in the four examples given in the table below.

	bytes
DIL switch	strobe		control	data		strobe
0000	0xB0	0xB0	0x05	0xB5	0xF0	0xD0
1000	0xB0	0xB0	0x05	0xB5	0xE1	0xD0
0100	0xB0	0xB0	0x05	0xB5	0xD2	0xD0
1111	0xB0	0xB0	0x05	0xB5	0x0F	0xD0

Taking the first example, we can break this down to see what each byte is doing

SCS	Packet			IN/OUT	Command	Payload	binary
0	0xb0			STROBE	PLL Mode		0b10110000
1	0xb0			STROBE	PLL Mode		0b10110000
2	0x5	0xb5	0xf0	IN	FIFO Data	TX data	0b00000101	0b10110101	0b11110000
817µs gap
3	0xd0			STROBE	TX Mode	transmission begins	0b11010000

It is difficult to work out what is going on here, according to the datasheet you send a packet of data 0xb5 0xf0 to be transmitted to FIFO Data 0x5 and follow that with the strobe command TX mode 0xd0, but what is transmitted bears no relation to the FIFO packet.

We need to look further back in the initialisation sequence and the datasheet, the A7105 has three modes of transmission; easy, segment and extension. We need to undertake a little bit of detective work to find which this is. Chapter 16.4 of the datasheet shows us the two registers used in the initialisation sequence we need to examine:

Bit:		7	6	5	4	3	2	1	0
FIFO I	0x3	FEP7	FEP6	FEP5	FEP4	FEP3	FEP2	FEP1	FEP0
Setting value:	0x1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
FIFO II	0x4	FPM1	FPM0	PSA5	PSA4	PSA3	PSA2	PSA1	PSA0
Setting value:	0x0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

The datasheet does not say directly so we need to go through each modes description to see which is the best fit. Segment FIFO looks good: “In Segment FIFO, TX FIFO length is equal to (FEP [7:0] – PSA [5:0] + 1). FPM [1:0] should be zero”. So our settings: (FEP:0b1 – PSA:0b0) + 1 = 2. The number of bytes sent our FIFO Data packet is also 2.

Further reading of the description “This function is very useful for button applications. In such case, each button is used to transmit fixed code (data) every time. During initialisation, each fixed code is written into corresponding segment FIFO once and for all. Then, if button is triggered, MCU just assigns corresponding segment FIFO (PSA [5:0] and FEP [7:0]) and issues TX strobe command.”

The Transmission
Taking an initial look at the data gathered during a shutter press on the Trigger Out (pin 8 of the microcontroller) we can clearly see the transition from Camera Ready and Flash as we saw on the oscilloscope earlier.

GIO2 shows a mirror of the Trigger Out, but zooming in to the data and I see that it follows the Trigger signal. Looking in the initialisation spreadsheet at SCS event we see that the command 0xc 0x1 was sent for setting the function of the GIO2 pin. Looking at the datasheet this appears to be set as an ‘I am transmitting’ signal, WTR – Wait until TX or RX has finished. If I force GIO2 low by sorting it to ground then the flash does not fire when I press the shutter

In my data capture the Camera Ready signal was transmitted six times, and the Flash signal thirteen times, I am sure this is dependant on the length of time I had the shutter button pressed on the camera.

Apologies for the inconclusive ending, I ran out of time to pursue this further

Links and Sources

• A7105 Datasheet and Product information
• Logic Analyser: https://www.ikalogic.com/scanaplus/
• SPI Data tutorial https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/serial-peripheral-interface-spi
• Arduino A7105 library: https://github.com/nh2/arduino-a7105
• Reverse Engineering a Hubsan X4 Quadcopter: http://www.jimhung.co.uk/?p=1424 with a description of the A7105 data
• SPI data bus and FSK – Frequency Shift Keying on Wikipedia