Party Message Board
Back to the beginning BYOB Party #1, "Bring you own Bulbs" - The Internet of Holiday Lights
I hope your all finding the information useful so far, this is proving to be a fun packed challenge
For today I have chosen to test out the 16*32 panels I bought from Adafruit, they arrived today 
(yaaa, so many presents already ), these are not really meant for UNOs and the like, there really for massive street signs and ideally driven by powerful FPGA based systems but the great folks at adafruit have done a superb job of writing some libraries to allow them to be driven by even an UNO or a Mega with plenty of room to spare for other code, these displays have to be driven as a matrix actively by the UNO (There not neo pixels) so a fair percentage of cpu time needs to be used to scan the images onto the panel
This is what you get:
You can find all the code and wiring details here: http://www.adafruit.com/product/420 and believe me, these things are awesome, wire them up as instructed, apply power and a test sketch and it just works, It was even working before I connected the correct supply to the panel (Albeit a bit dimly)
My plan it to have Mr UNO or Mrs Yun drive this and possibly another to display web messages of cheer from a web site or twitter feed, may need moderation though or a menu of messages to select from, but for now I wanted to test how easy it is to use and send a holiday greeting to my companion competitors and eager followers
so here is the video of this working, and I have to say, these things are AWESOME
WARNING:
While I'm on the subject of testing, I did discover an annoying feature of the Infineon RGB Board (Or more specifically the Yun and its compatibility with Shields) , It wont fit on the Yun without using a set of Stacking headers (The kind you get if your making your own shields)
Here is what happens without
As you can see, the board barely makes contact with the sockets and it is already hitting the top of the Ethernet port, nothing that a set of stacking headers cant fix, but of course you need the headers, also available from Adafruit
Now it works (The stacking header pins are long, they are well and truly inserted)
OK, that's it for this update, with luck more goodies will arrive tomorrow and I will share more details of how to connect up and where to get libraries
