I have been asked by a friend to do a project,

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I have been asked by a friend to do a project, it is quite a simple one but the hardware has me stumped. So he would like to have a waterproof sign out above a shop he owns. The sign should be about 3-5m in length by about 50cm-75cm in height.
It would display the current temperature.

Any recommendations on how I go about this?? I was thinking of joining the 32x32 matrix boards together and adding a temperature sensor. My issue is I have never used a matrix before, so would it be possible to code as such??

Thanks in advance

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Are you thinking a full matrix layout because you want to scroll the temperature and/or other stuff across the sign? Or are you just looking to display a two digit number and have LEDs around the boarder or back lighting some other text?

If you do 3-5 meters of 32x32 matrix boards that’s going to be a lot of pixels.

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I would like to sign to be able to, if possible, display the logo of the company on one side, and on the other to have the temperature displayed with 4 digits (xx.xC e.g 21.5C). I won’t be scrolling any information across the board

A border with the lights whilst not necessary would be preferred

I was initially thinking to use LED strips, but I’m not convinced it is possible to make it look professional and easy to read whilst using them(open to being proven wrong). Thus it leaves me with the matrix boards. Do you know how big the 33x32 boards are? Also how easy is it to connect many of them together?

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To go back and answer your original question, yes it would be possible to code temperature numbers being displayed across one or more matrix boards. You might have to code it yourself or maybe you could use something like Aaron Liddiment’s LEDMatrix and Text library provided it has a look you like.

Have you done some sketches of what you want the numbers display to look like, thinking in terms of numbers being created out of a grid of pixels? How many pixels tall and wide will the “font” be for the numbers? And is the vertical part of a number “1” for example 1,2,3 or even 4 columns of pixels wide? In other words, how large and readable do the numbers need to be?
And what will the overall display of the whole sign will look like? Is the company logo going to be created out of pixels too?

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For understanding purposes let’s say the board is 3m x 50cm
Height of the numbers should be 40cm in any text format that works. So half the space can be used for the temperature and half for the logo(1.45m each and a bit for borders)

At the moment I haven’t done any sketches because I am unsure what hardware to use/how many pixels the length would be or the height.

Just trying to gauge what I can do at the moment. As an example I know people use the OctoWS2811 to power strips and Paul Straffogen(sp?) has linked a video to that before, however I personally don’t think that’s quite right for this as the spacing between the strips may be too much. However having just seen the apa102 2020 strips I was thinking that is a possibility to linking it all together.

I hope you see what I am getting at. I’m just trying to tease out all options and then go from there

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If you use 60 led per meter led strips then the matrix is 180x30 pixel. Total 5400 leds
The text is 5x7 so you can have 3 line of text and 30 characters.
Only using 5 characters for temperature you have 150x30 for logo graphic