If you’ve seen one LED matrix, you’ve seen them all. The size and pitch may vary from one panel to the next, but it’s the same basic idea: a bunch of LEDs laid out in a grid. There is at least one glaring exception to this rule now, however. A hobbyist who goes by the name yotudero has built a unique LED matrix that almost looks too good to be true. With some 3D-printed parts and a few basic electronic components, you can have one too.
Attaching LED strips to the backplate (📷: yotudero)
The key to the build is a custom housing designed and built by yotudero. It has a 3D-printed backplate that holds everything together and acts as a mounting point for the LEDs. A 3D-printed grid sits on top of the backplate to cleanly separate the light from the LEDs into individual pixels. This was spray-painted white to increase the panel’s brightness. A 0.5mm-thick layer of polypropylene foil was glued on top of the grid to act as a diffuser, followed by a 3D-printed front cover to top things off.
WS2815 RGB LED strips were attached to the backplate with their own adhesive. They were attached in a 16×16 array to illuminate the circular elements in the grid, and this was interwoven by another 15×15 array that illuminates the diamond-shaped elements. The LED strips were all daisy-chained together and powered by an external 12V power supply.
The Wemos D1 Mini Pro (📷: yotudero)
To control the display, a Wemos D1 Mini Pro development board with an ESP8266 microcontroller was added to the build. An LM2596 voltage regulator steps the input voltage down to 5V to power this board. To drive the LED strips, a GPIO pin from the D1 Mini Pro is connected to their data pin via a 74HCT125 voltage-level shifter.
The electronics are super simple, so if you have a decent 3D printer, this project would not be too terribly difficult to reproduce. And after you watch the video below, you will definitely want your own!
