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Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this sweet 64 x 32 square RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, here in New York we see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. We thought they looked really cool so we picked up a few boxes of them from a factory.
This version is the 2.5mm pitch 64x32 RGB LED Matrix. Please note you cannot use an Arduino UNO to drive this size, it's way too big! Use an Arduino Mega, Raspberry Pi, BBB or other device that can handle displaying to RGB matricies and has plenty of RAM.
This is a lot like our 3mm pitch 64x32 RGB LED matrix panel, but the LEDs are eeeven closer, at a tight 2.5mm (P2.5) pitch. It's made to look good indoors, even with a wide-angle view (160 degrees), and look great in ambient light. If you are looking for a wider pitch for a farther view distance, check out our 6mm pitch 64x32 RGB LED Matrix.
This matrix has 2048 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 64x32 grid on the front. On the back, there is a PCB with two IDC connectors (one input, one output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:16 scan rate.
These displays are technically 'chainable' - connect one output to the next input - but the Arduino example code does not support this (yet). It requires a high-speed processor and more RAM than the Arduino has!
These panels require 13 digital pins (6-bit data, 7-bit control) and a good 5V supply, up to 4A per panel. We suggest our 4A regulated 5V adapter and then connecting a 2.1mm jack. Please check out our tutorial for more details!
Comes with:
Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you're supposed to redraw the screen over and over to 'manually' PWM the whole thing. On a 16 MHz Arduino Mega, we managed to squeeze 12-bit color (4096 colors) with 40% CPU usage but this display would really shine if driven by any FPGA, CPLD, Propeller, XMOS or other high speed multi-core controller. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs it's not a particularly tinted white.
Of course, Adafruit wouldn't leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" They have a full wiring diagrams and working Arduino library code with examples from drawing pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. You'll get your color blasting within the hour! On an Arduino, you'll need 16 digital pins, and about 3200 bytes of RAM to buffer the 12-bit color image.
