Giant LED Matrix Fills the Space Above Kitchen Cabinets

So you want to avoid the dreaded "basic" home decor and know not to hang any "live, laugh, love" or "gather" signs. But what do you do with all of that space on top of your kitchen cabinets? You certainly don't want to emulate your mother by shoving some plants and bottles of pasta up there like you live in an Italian restaurant. Maybe you can take some inspiration from James Miller, who built a gigantic LED matrix to display the time and Conway's Game of Life above the kitchen cabinets.

Miller recently built a small LED matrix to put on his desk. It is a multi-function display and he wrote a Python version of Conway's Game of Life to run on it. After successfully pulling off that project, Miller decided he could scale the idea up to much larger proportions and fill that conspicuously empty space above his kitchen cabinets.

This enbiggened LED matrix is about 2.5 feet tall and 10 feet wide. It is also a custom shape, with one corner lopped off to accommodate a slope in the ceiling. So commercial displays were out of the question and Miller had to fabricate everything himself. To get a good balance of resolution and practicality, he settled on a 39×10 cell matrix. Each cell in the matrix is its own little cubby to prevent light bleed. The outer frame of the matrix is wood board, but the backing and cell dividers are foam core board.

To illuminate the cells, Miller took the sensible route and chose to use strips of WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs. The size of the cells match the LED spacing, so each cell has a single LED roughly in the center. There are 390 LEDs in total, so Miller sourced a beefy 18A 5V power supply. An ESP32 runs the WLED Project firmware to control all of the LEDs. That is very handy firmware, because it includes all kinds of different effects, animations, and data displays. It can also integrate with a bunch of different software and communication protocols, so the possibilities are endless.

After mapping the matrix, Miller was able to set up several different displays. The matrix can show the time, fun animations, and even Conway's Game of Life. Now nobody can accuse Miller of having basic taste in over-cabinet decor.