You can have a lot of fun with an Arduino-controlled LED matrix, from displaying simple text and data through to playing games like Tetris or a Conway’s “Game of Life” situation. And with a little effort you can make your own, as demonstrated by Instructables member vastsuperking.
They show us how easy it is to create an LED matrix with seven rows of twenty LEDs, for example:
With some careful planning and drilling, you can mount the LEDs in a neat and orderly arrangement and them manually solder all the LEDs into the row/column system as you can see in the image above. The display is generated by controlling each row of LEDs in turn using a form of Charlieplexing.
For more information on this project and making your own LED matrix, visit the Instructable page. And for more, we’re on facebook, Google+, and twitter – so follow us for news and product updates as well.
If you would like to have an LED matrix for your Arduino but not incllined to build you own – check out our Freetronics Dot Matrix Displays. They’re simple to use, yet very bright for indoor and outdoor situations. Available in various colours, the 32 x 16 LED matrix can display text and graphics quite easily – and can be daisy-chained together for extended displays. For more information, see our range of Dot Matrix Displays here.
