LED Matrix Simulator

I was too impatient for my Adafruit 32x16 LED Matrix display to arrive, so I made one using HTML5 Canvas.

⚠️ Note that this is an untested project meant for fun and learning, it's not meant to be used in production.

📍 See in in action here

Technologies used:

• Typescript
• Preact
• HTML5 Canvas

Bitmap fonts

Microcontrollers need special bitmap fonts to display text or digits on Crystal or LED Matrix displays. These fonts are usually represented in an array of arrays of hexadecimal bytes. Something like this:

const unsigned char font[96][6] = {
  {0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00}, //  
  {0x2f,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00}, // !
  {0x03,0x00,0x03,0x00,0x00,0x00}, // "
        ...

This array contains 96 characters (each character 6 bytes) ordered by their character code in Unicode table. So for example space is index 0, ! is index 1 and so on. So to find the character's index, we need to subtract 32 from it's characrer code. Each character in this font map is an array of 6 bytes, and each byte represents a column on the external display:

{0x3C,0x12,0x12,0x12,0x3E,0x00}, // A

To turn this into pixel data, each hex item needs to be converted to binary. This can be done easily in Javascript:

0x12.toString(2); // 00010010

From here it get's easy. 00010010 is a column on the display, and six of those form a letter. Read more about these fonts.

Related

• matrix-display-store
• rpi-matrix
• led-matrix

LICENSE

Released under the MIT License.

Adafruit Plasma Example

The original code for the Plasma example is copied over from the Adafruit RGB Matrix panel library examples directory.

Written by Limor Fried/Ladyada & Phil Burgess/PaintYourDragon for Adafruit Industries.  
BSD license, all text above must be included in any redistribution