Progress Since Design Report

or a quick recap on my project, im creating a led matrix in a wooden housing. The led matrix should be able to accept a picture of hopefully a gif and display it. I want to be able to operate it remotely. The wooden housing is planned to be non-intrusive and would only act to support the matrix not take away from it. 

There is a list of things I need to do I need to acquire all of my materials, build the housing, build the matrix, code the matrix, and finally put it all together. For coding the matrix I need to find out a way to make it accept pictures and display them remotely. I would also like to look into putting a battery in it so it doesn’t always have to be plugged into the wall.  See the timeline below.

As of right now, I have gotten a lot of the tasks done. I have acquired all my materials and finished the cad model. I have cut all the wood to the correct sizes and assembled the wooden housing. The led matrix has been assembled as well. Now I only have to worry about putting together the code to display a given image. 

The wood I bought was off of amazon. Its multifunction unfinished wood and it is a darker wood glued together. See the image below.

For the led matrix i worked with pat in the idea forge to get a general idea of what needed to be done. Lucky for me they sell kits for something similar, so i bought one of those and soldered it all together. I then put a diffuser in front of the matrix. https://www.adafruit.com/product/2277

Going forward I need to code the way for me to upload pictures. After talking to pat and looking around GitHub I found someone’s code for something similar. I will reference a GitHub from Henner Zeller (https://github.com/hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix) to make the code that I need. I plan to use a raspberry pi as the controller as it offers a program called RealVNC viewer that would allow me to operate the display remotely and it is generally pretty small.   

For powering it with a battery I think that charging a lithium battery with a 5V power supply would be sufficient. This however is an extra requirement that i have for myself.   

Im excited about how this project is going to look and look forward to having a working display.