A hand-crafted 8×8 LED matrix driven on Arduino using the MCP23017 GPIO expander and controlled via Bluetooth from an Android device.
The internet is littered with tutorials teaching how to use dot matrices or build them, so why add-in another one I hear you say? Simply because making LED displays is fun, the outcome is eye-pleasing and useful in every way you could imagine. And since we’re at the age of IoT, what a better way to interact with it than from your smartphone. I used the LED matrix I built as a scrolling ticker, just to showcase the versatility of such a device. In the following I’ll shed some light on the essential building blocks of this project.