I’ve been an avid China shopper for a while now as they make incredible things to play with at home, for prices that can’t possibly be beat by any western manufacturer. There is the issue of quality assurance of course, but in recent times this has dramatically improved (or at least that is my impression). Last week the mailman delivered an item I was looking forward to, a RGB LED Matrix of 32 by 32 pixels (size 16 by 16 cm), a great find on AliExpress for just below 20 euro.
There seems to be no datasheet of this display at the moment, but Adafruit did an excellent tutorial on wiring it together and provides a library to get it working with your Arduino. The matrix requires a total of 2 amps when all the LEDs are turned on to white, and provides two IDC connectors on the back, so linking them together should be easy enough.
[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prETtND7fOg”]
My Arduino is vastly underpowered to display fluent motion on this display as the refreshing of it takes quite a lot of effort, so soon I’ll hook it up to a bit more powerfull board. Also I’m not entirely sure what to do with the item yet, maybe order a couple more and make something nice to look at like Frans-Willem Hardijzer did.