Medium 16x32 RGB LED Matrix Panel

Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this 16 x 32 RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, in New York you see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. They have 512 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 16x32 grid on the front. On the back there is a PCB with two IDC connectors (one input, one output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:8 scan rate. These displays are 'chainable' - connect one output to the next input - but the Arduino example code does not support this (yet). It requires a high speed processor and more RAM than the Arduino has! These panels require 12 digital pins (6 bit data, 6 bit control) and a good 5V supply, up to 2A per panel. We suggest a 2A regulated 5V adapter and then soldering a jack on. Please check out the tutorial for more details! Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you're supposed to redraw the screen over and over to 'manually' PWM the whole thing. On a 16 MHz arduino, it's possible to squeeze 12-bit color (4096 colors) with 20% CPU usage but this display would really shine if driven by any FPGA, CPLD, Propeller, XMOS or other high speed multi-core controller. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs its not a particularly tinted white. Of course, you're not left without a datasheet and a "good luck!" There are full wiring diagrams and working Arduino library code with examples from drawing pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. You'll get your color blasting within the hour! On an Arduino, you'll need 12 digital pins, and about 800 bytes of RAM to buffer the 12-bit color image. At this time there are not wiring documentation for the MEGA, but the tutorial will be updated in the next week to add MEGA. Please note! These panels are remainder stock from factories that make huge light boards. For that reason, the look, LED tint, power cable style and length, and precise size might vary from batch to batch, even though the basic operation, codebase and tutorial is the same.