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Check out this DIY LED matrix pong game, which is Arduio-controlled and uses a rotary encoder as input device and two 8×8 bi-color LED matrix boards for game display. The LED matrix displays are driven by MAX7219 chips.
Arduino pong game
I shared the details of my single-color 8X40 LED matrix display board project here a few months ago. Here is a nice instructable on making a 7 Bi-color 8×8 LED Matrix Scrolling Text Display with Bluetooth support; which means you can send messages and commands to the display via Bluetooth using a Smart Phone. The author illustrates using an Android-based phone, but any devices capable of sending text messages via Bluetooth would work.
Bi-color LED matrix with Bluetooth support
The project uses 7 Bi-color 8×8 LED matrices, each controlled by two MAX7219 chips. The beauty of using MAX7219 is they take a lot of work off the micro-controller and simplify the design. Moreover, they can be daisy chained and require only three output pins on the micro-controller for the required SPI-interface. The project is constructed using the Arduino embedded platform. In order to achieve faster speed and better scrolling effect, the author used the chipKit Uno32 board instead of the original Arduino Uno board. A HC-07 Bluetooth module is used for wireless serial communications between the display and the Android Smart Phone.
LED matrix displays provide flexibility to display text, graphics, animations, and video, and therefore, they have become a popular mean of displaying information these days. You can see them at gas stations displaying the gas prices, or in the public places displaying information, and alongside highways displaying advertisements on large dot matrix panels. This project is about constructing a mono-color LED matrix display board that consists 320 LEDs arranged in 8 rows and 40 columns. The heart of this project is PIC16F1847 microcontroller which receives data from a PC through a serial port (or USB using an USB-UART interface), and display on the LED matrix with the help of five 74HC595 shift registers.
8x40 LED Matrix Display
We covered how to interface seven segment LED displays to a PIC microcontroller in two sections: Lab 6 and Lab 11. Today, we will move on to interfacing an LED dot matrix display. LED dot matrices are very popular means of displaying information as it allows both static and animated text and images. Perhaps, you have encountered them at gas stations displaying the gas prices, or in the public places and alongside highways, displaying advertisements on large dot matrix panels. In this experiment, we will discuss about the basic structure of a monochrome (single color) LED dot matrix and its interface with a microcontroller to display static characters and symbols. We will cover the animation stuff in next tutorial. I am using the PIC18F2550 microcontroller on the StartUSB for PIC board for demonstration, but this technique is applicable to any other microcontrollers that have sufficient I/O pins to drive the LED matrix.
Interfacing a LED dot matrix display with a PIC microcontroller
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