Published June 10, 2015 © CC BY-SA

Connected LED Information Display

Display for showing online information using a combination of smoothly animating graphics and a text overlay - start with weather use case

AdvancedWork in progress1,797

Things used in this project

Hardware components

SmartMatrix Display

TP-Link WR-703N Router

Story

The SmartMatrix Shield for Teensy 3.1 and the open source SmartMatrix product on Kickstarter can display beautiful animations and dynamically-generated patterns on a 32x32-pixel RGB LED matrix display, but so far haven't been connected to the internet. The goal of this project is to get a SmartMatrix panel online, displaying online content in an attractive and easy to understand way.

SmartMatrix has a USB device connection, but no wireless interfaces. The plan is to add a low-cost WiFi Router running OpenWRT which can poll a server for information, then send instructions to the SmartMatrix display to show the information using GIF animations and static or scrolling text overlaid on top. The router can also be used to stream graphics in real time to the display.

This project was started at the Hackster Hardware Weekend in Brooklyn, but is still ongoing. The first step of getting software on the router to run took up most of the weekend.

Currently a WR-703N router running OpenWRT and a modified Fadecandy server is used to receive video over a WiFi or Ethernet connection, then relay that to the SmartMatrix display running a modified version of Fadecandy firmware to receive video.

In the future, applications will be added to the OpenWRT router to collect information from the internet and send either graphics or data to the SmartMatrix display.