What are some problems of LED displays with only a few LEDs?
ANSWER. Unless you’re lucky, you can’t make real-world LEDs match your mathematical design. If you use just a few LEDs, the calculations indicate that the intensities are off. You see, you can’t correct for fractional LEDs. Instead, your calculation must round to the nearest LED. Rounding introduces an intensity error. Depending on your LEDs, this error might be small or large. Fortunately, you can ignore small errors. Also, you must include a “fudge factor.” This fudge factor makes sure that you never round to fewer than three LEDs. (In the case of a two-color display, that’s two LEDs.) Well, the fudge factor necessarily throws off your color accuracy. But the possibility of full color is more important than perfect accuracy. Anyway, you can tweak color intensity with brightness pots. I wrote a script that performs all these calculations for you. After you have your numbers, you should apply common sense and examine the results. See if everything rounds out the way it should. You shou
