You may have heard; the incandescent light-bulb is dying. According to Wikipedia, Brazil, Venezuela, the European Union, Switzerland, Australia, Argentina and China have already implemented legislation to phase out the old bulbs. The United States, Canada and Malaysia will follow in 2014.
So what remains of the lighting market, and why should embedded developers care? What is left is the creative destruction of our previous lighting market, a tabula rossa, awaiting definition by innovative embedded designers. And as onerous a task as it is to innovate your way to the top of a tumultuous consumer market, I have good news. Whether it is illumination, signage, backlights or automotive lighting, TI provides the analog and embedded processing expertise that will help you achieve your goals in lighting design.
For proof, we need only look back to May of 2013, when TI added the Tiva™ C Series Microcontrollers (MCUs) to its portfolio – the latest component to help designers innovate lighting solutions. The Tiva C Series provides a family of 32-bit ARM® Cortex-M, mixed-signal microcontrollers running up to 80 MHz, with memory variants between 32 and 256KB flash. These devices have a few features that are tailored specifically for LED and professional stage lighting control. For example, every GPIO on the device can both toggle at CPU speed and simultaneously source up to 8 mA. Think how many LEDs could be controlled by the Tiva TM4C123x MCU without exceeding the maximum current of the device! These devices also support up to 40 individual pulse-width modulators (PWMs), 16 of which have specific motor control functionality built-in. This integration makes design very easy for lighting applications that integrate motion.
TI also understands that good hardware also needs equally good software to provide competitive ease of use, so with our Tiva C Series MCUs, we are proud to offer TivaWare. TivaWare for C series is a set of free-license, royalty-free peripheral drivers and middleware that gives customers everything they need to program the Tiva TM4C123x MCU. This includes peripheral driver, USB, graphics and sensor libraries, as well as programming utilities like bootloaders, encryption acceleration and in-system programming routines. As a testament to the quality of the software, TI puts TivaWare for Tiva C Series MCUs into the ROM on all Tiva devices. Customers that leverage TivaWare for Tiva C Series MCUs can therefore focus their time differentiating their application rather than getting the hardware to work, since they can just call predefined, pretested ROM libraries, instead of having to create hardware abstraction layers from the ground-up.
The easiest way to see if the Tiva TM4C123x MCU platform fits your lighting application needs would be to get started with a Tiva Launchpad. These evaluation kits enable evaluation of the USB Host and motion-control features of the Tiva TM4C123x MCUs for just $12.99 and are easily extended through their male/female connectors using BoosterPacks. There are literally dozens of compatible BoosterPacks, but I would like to highlight one in particular, since it is an array of LEDs. A hobbyist put together a very cool demo of an equalizer that you can see here:
http://www.euphonistihack.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-writeup.html
Also make sure to check out the Launchpad training videos!
As always, feel free to comment on this thread with any questions. I look forward to seeing what exciting lighting solutions you guys will design!