Led Matrix 16x32 RGB

These displays are ‘chainable’ - connect one output to the next input (at this moment Arduino example code does not support this). 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.

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, you can 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.

On an Arduino, you’ll need 12 digital pins, and about 800 bytes of RAM to buffer the 12-bit color image.

Tutorial can be found on learn.adafruit.

WARNING: connector and power cables are no longer included