Do You Arduino?A couple guys see if they can make anything cool with Arduino

Since yesterday was Father’s Day, I was left to my own devices for a while so that I could do something(s) that Ijust hadn’t the time or chance to get around to… One of those was building a LED scrolling matrix. I had always admired the 8×56 matrix over at Adventures of Arduino and Me. Thankfully, he had taken the time to craft his sketch so that you could duplicate his efforts with as few as two 8×8 LED matrices. While I had enough components to make up to an 8×80, I do not have enough hook-up wires. The best I could do is what you see here: a 8×24. While there lacked some precision in the instructions, that actually worked out to my benefit in the long run since that meant I had to do a little research among my components’ data sheets to verify all the pinouts. Taking my time & being consistent almost certainly contributed greatly to my success as I didn’t have any major issues assembling the hardware–just the occasional resistors touching one another was the extent of any problems.

Then once I had it all together, I noticed that the “font” characters were only 5×7–the top row wasn’t being used. A little searching around led me to a dot matrix font generator over at Instructables.com. I had to convert the hex values in the spreadsheet to decimal, but it was worth the effort.

Word of advice for anyone looking to replicate this project: Definitely make sure to follow the links to the arduino.cc forum. The original sketch along with an invaluable hand-drawn circuit diagram can be found there.

You tell me how it looks…

And yes, as soon as I have more hook-up wire, I’m definitely going to see how big I can make this matrix!
Code: