LED Panel display 16x32 for $14.

Update at end:

 

I recommend you follow on YouTube bigclivedotcom in particular a few weeks ago he showed this video...

The summary is,  a toy 'handbag' that has a standard (75 hub) 16x32 LED panel, that you can get on ebay for about $14.

Bigclivedotcom does the teardown etc...

I will fast forward to application.


Because it is a standard 75hub display, you can use Adafruit's data to install and use.  Here is the software code for Pi.

I am using a Raspberry Pi with the RGB Matrix HAT to drive the display.  For cables I searched for 75hub cables and found these at Amazon.   These LED boards have 4pin power plugs, so eventually I found a bag of these.  And these panels only had one connector...so I needed to solder some on to daisy chain the data lines.  I got these from Digi-Key.

Note the high tech blue painters tape...this is just to support it while I test it, the Pi and LED driver board are under the bluetape.


The first panel worked so well...I bought 3 more...and because these displays are designed to be daisy chained...

Some examples of the code and output.  located in this directory.

cd rpi-rgb-led-matrix/examples-api-use/

sudo ./demo -D 0 --led-rows=16 -b50 --led-chain=1 --led-pixel-mapper="U-mapper"

sudo ./demo -D 0 --led-rows=16 -b50 --led-chain=2 --led-pixel-mapper="U-mapper"

sudo ./demo -D 0 --led-rows=16 -b50 --led-chain=4 --led-pixel-mapper="U-mapper"



For the next two you need to specify a font...and specifically a .bdf font...luckily they are included.

 sudo ./scrolling-text-example -f ../fonts/helvR12.bdf -b 75 -s 3 --led-rows=16 --led-chain=2 There is another...

sudo ./scrolling-text-example -f ../fonts/helvR12.bdf -b 75 -s 3 --led-rows=16 --led-chain=4 There is another...



I am just figuring out the software, and I want to make a mount so that I can swivel the two upper panels to be in a row with the lower ones for some applications.

After playing with this, I found this write up.  So that is what is on my sign now.  Here is the Github.

BTW I changed the time display in this rgb-32x64.py code from the writeup.

around line 439

original code was [  text = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%H:%M")  ]

now it is [  text = datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%H:%M Local") + '  ' + datetetime.utcnow().strftime("  %H%M UTC  ") ]

That displays the time as   9:45 Local    1545 UTC   (depending on your time zone obviously)

You could probably add more time zones, but that adds a level of difficulty.