Patent ID: 7450085

Claim:
An intelligent lighting module for use in a lighting or display module system, comprising an array of lighting modules, each of said lighting modules being provided with a display board with an array of individual pixel lighting elements and with a control board capable of controlling serial input data from a video source for displaying video as well as of controlling digital communication input data from a lighting console for creating digital lighting effects, wherein the display board comprises a drive buffer and an array of pulse-width modulation (PWM) drivers which are connected to the lighting elements and wherein the control board comprises: a serial data input; a communication data input; a memory containing data, executable code, and an installation controller containing installation parameters of the intelligent lighting module such as the position and orientation of the module in the lighting or display system and the module viewing angle; a memory containing ambient environmental data and display data during run time; and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) comprising: a converter to “de-serialize” the incoming serial data in order to produce parallel pixel data in the form of lighting data and lighting addresses; a write look-up table and a read look-up table which provide cross-reference indexes that map the lighting data to the correct lighting element of the display board; a display buffer; and a central processing unit (CPU) to write the lighting data to memory in the order of sequential pixel addresses by using the write look-up table and thereby translating the original lighting address order to the sequential pixel address order and, in order to illuminate the lighting elements, to read the lighting data from the random access memory by using an address modified by the read look-up table and thereby converting the stored lighting data from sequential pixel address order to display drive order, and latching said lighting data via the display buffer onto the drive buffer of the display board to activate the pulse-width modulation drivers of the display board to produce an image at the display rate.