Bring Your LED Matrix Project Into The Living Room

If you’re able to make a project look this good it shouldn’t be hard to convince that significant other to let you install it in a prominent place in the house. We think [Greg Friedland] pulled this off perfectly by building a 4’x8′ tablet controlled LED matrix.

First of all, everything looks better in a shiny case. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this looks nice, thanks to the face plates which are mounted in a way that gives them a modern style (we’d expect to see this hanging in Ikea). They’re acrylic diffuser panels meant for used with lighting in a suspended ceiling. They do a nice job of scattering the light put off by the 544 LED modules that make up the display. The wiring was made easy by using LED strands where each pixel has its own control chip (WS2801). It sounds like the display will peak at around 160 Watts, which isn’t really that much considering the area. One nice touch that’s shown off in the video after the break is a full-feature iPad interface that even allows you to paint in light using your finger. But we’re also satisfied that [Greg] posted about the physical build too.

6 thoughts on “Bring Your LED Matrix Project Into The Living Room

  1. Fantastic. May have to be my next project :-)
    The only thing I can think of to improve would be to remove the standoffs in the middle. Once I noticed them, I found they were kind of distracting.

  2. This project is indeed excellent, but I looked at the price per pixel for this specific project and it comes out to $1.43/pixel, for this panel this is $782 for 544 LEDs… so yeah, it’s cool no doubt, but very expensive for what it is.

    1. Actually, these pixels can be found for much cheaper than $1.50 per pixel. If you buy directly from a manufacturer you can get them for under $1.00 per pixel for small quantities. For quantities at this scale the price point is much closer to 60cents per pixel shipped. Point being certain US resellers are making about $1 per pixel off consumers.

  3. This is ideal thing you can have in the office for Entertainment and this is going to be my next project.

    I read the step by step setup. the only place where I am confused is ………… how does iPad communicates with the LED ?

    Which microprocessors / sensors have you placed and how do the work.

    Sorry If I sound stupid but I am new to all this but really want to get my hands on it.

    Thanks

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