My wife’s maternity leave was wrapping up, but I wanted her to still feel our little guy’s presence so I put together a little display that kept her up to date with his day to day. The 64×64 LED matrix pulls data from a google sheet that I update via a google form. The display takes those inputs and populates 8 different kinds of particles that bump around and interact throughout the display. The particles move around the board based on randomly positioned gravity wells that get updated every 30 seconds or so creating a little universe of moving stars.

Hardware

I utilized a P2 64×64 RGB LED matrix that I had lying around coupled with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. In order to diffuse the light I utilized a 3mm piece of black translucent acrylic. The assembly is then compressed together with small 3D printed corner pieces that compresses the acrylic to the LED matrix’s frame.

Software

I leveraged this library for the LED matrix control https://github.com/mrcodetastic/ESP32-HUB75-MatrixPanel-DMA. Worked mostly flawlessly except that I had to tweak the configuration settings for my particular display’s controller.

In order to pull data from google I utilized this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LoeaewIAdY Really cool technique that leverages google’s script/macros to public display information embedded within google sheets. By creating a google form that auto populated a google sheet I had a convenient way to input the information throughout the day and have the display pull down that data.