16x24 Red LED Matrix Panel

This LED panel takes care of all the work of making a big matrix display. Each panel has six 8x8 red matrix modules, for a 16x24 matrix. The panel uses an HT1632C chip on the back which does all the multiplexing work for you and has a 3-pin SPI-like serial interface to communicate to it and set LEDs on or off (you cannot set an LED to be individually dimmed, as in 'grayscale'). There are a few extras as well, such as being able to change the brightness of the entire display, or blink the entire display at 1 Hz.

One really nice thing about this particular LED matrix module is that it is designed to be daisy-chainable; you can connect to 8 panels together to make an extra long display.

It comes as a fully assembled and ready to go panel with a 10-pin IDC cable. You will need a microcontroller to control the display. The tutorial uses an Arduino but nearly any microcontroller with 3 digital output pins can be used. If you want to chain two displays, you can use the two IDC cables in the packages to connect them. But for 3+ chained displays you will need more cables - check the tutorial, search for "How many Cables do I need?" for an explanation.

And of course, there is a full written tutorial and Arduino library that not only takes care of controlling the display, it also intelligently handles chained displays, so they appear to be one long matrix. The library has functions for drawing pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. You'll be making it light up in 15 minutes!

Downloads & Resources

• Download the library - Follow the link and then click the DOWNLOADS button in the top right corner. Once downloaded, rename the uncompressed folder HT1632. Check that the HT1632 folder contains HT1632.cpp and HT1632.h Place the HT1632 library folder your /libraries/ folder in the Arduino IDE. You may need to create the libraries subfolder if it's your first library. Restart the IDE.
• HT1632C datasheet

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