led turn signal project?

I have a 98 honda prelude and was thinking of making some led turnsignals for the rear.  I still haven't come up with a complete design, just throwing some ideas around right now.  I want to have an array of leds 30 columns and 3 rows.  This is the tricky part...I want to make them blink (shift) to the left or right, depending on which turn signal is on.  If I put on the left turn signal, I want the rightmost leds to turn on and then make the rest of the leds turn on in a gradual shift to the left (like 1 second total per cycle with a break of .5 seconds in between).  I'm an EE major so i'm fairly familiar with technical stuff, I just don't know where to begin here.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Keith

I Have done somthing Simular in that I put 15 LED's in a "V" shape in my outside rear view mirrors and sequence the LED's inpairs ( except for the one at the point of the "V") .  I used a Microchip Flash Microcontroller 16F627A  thgat I programmed.  Since this Microcontroller only has 14 usable I/O( 18 Pin )   You would be better off using  a Microchip 18F452 which has 33 Pins of I/O  of which you could use 29 for your project ( 1 Pin Turn Signal Demand, 1 for Brake Demand, 1 for Master Reset , ans 1 for Clock Input )  Since the 18F452 does not have unought Output to drive all the LED's use Transistors to drive the LED's  What I have done is used the Car's 12 VDC supply with a 5VDC regulator for the 16F452 and a 3.3 VDC regulator for the LED's, the LED's I used are super Bright Red 70 Ma.  I turn them on in sequence for Turning and all on for Braking.  As for the Program the program runs a simple loop and when a turn or Brake demand is inputed the Program goes into a INTERRUPT routing with a timer controlling the sequence rate that is programmable ( I have set it at about 2 second for the turn sequence )

If you would like any more information you can contact me at

richard.wamser@sbcglobal.net

When dealing with that many LEDs I would also suggest that you look in to a matrix configuration and multiplex the outputs.  You can use 12 output pins to control 36 different sets of lights (I'm assuming each column will be a set).  Should be able to complete the entire project with a 20 pin chip, as long as you use separate circuits for each side.  Atmel is supposed to be releasing a family of 20 pin chips this quarter.  The Atmel chips can drive LEDs directly (although probably not in this circumstance) and can be configured to use a fairly accurate onboard clock (reducing overall system components).  Keep us updated on your progress with this! 

• The pulse from the flasher can be stretched for other uses, such as a cornering lamp
• We have 2 outputs from the directional switch, to tell which lamp to turn on(l/r)
• Cops have directional controllers which will sequence lights in an array to a direction- available under 40