Hello FastLED Community. I have built a 42x7 matrix in a serpentine layout (one

Archive FastLED Archive
1

Hello FastLED Community. I have built a 42x7 matrix in a serpentine layout (one data pin), and have the basics working with the XYMatrix example sketch. I would like to display text and simple bitmaps. Google searches are turning up a wide variety of options none of which I have found to be straight forward for my custom WS2811 matrix.

I have found a 5x7 font that would fit my matrix (link below), but am unclear how to map their hex values to what I assume is binary on/off for columns of pixels.

Any suggestions on where to begin?

Thanks

5x7 font: https://github.com/lancetw/glcd-arduino/blob/master/glcd/fonts/SystemFont5x7.h

2

You might check out @Aaron_Liddiment code for text.

3

@Marc_MERLIN Weren’t you doing stuff with text?

4

@marmil yep. LEDText is a very featureful library although you have to make sure you can get LEDMatrix to support your underlying layout first, and the API is very fancy, but not super obvious to use (the examples given, help though).
For simpler stuff, adafruit GFX text is simple and works fine with FastLED::NeoMatrix.
You can look at https://github.com/marcmerlin/FastLED_NeoMatrix/tree/master/examples/fontzoom for a fancy font zoom feature, and
https://github.com/marcmerlin/FastLED_NeoMatrix/blob/master/examples/MatrixGFXDemo/MatrixGFXDemo.ino#L528
and
https://github.com/marcmerlin/NeoMatrix-FastLED-IR/blob/master/NeoMatrix-FastLED-IR.ino#L484

5

Thank you all, will try these out.

6

I have had some success and a bit of confusion. Two of the examples in LEDMatrix put my esp32 in crash loop. I did get MatrixGFXDemo to work, though I cannot seem to slow down the delays between demos, or get it to display more than ~20 characters of text. My hope is to display a graphic/bitmap and some simple text (not scrolling text) at the same time. Will keep trying and follow up.

Thank you!

7

@Roger_Guess the main FastLED branch is not stable on ESP32, sadly, which may be the problems you’re having.
Try https://github.com/samguyer/FastLED
The delays between demos in MatrixGFXDemo are simple delay() commands in loop(), I’m not sure how you can not increase the delay value or what isn’t working for you

8

Ah, so apparently delay() does not work with the ESP32. You must take advantage of something like millis() and track time elapsed.

9

@Roger_Guess really? I don’t remember delay not working on ESP32, but if that’s really the case, try http://blog.podkalicki.com/esp32-blinky-with-delay-function/ vTaskDelay