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ESP32 powered 16x8x8 LED matrix displaying real-time news, weather, stock data, date, time and barometer information, menu controllable.

The idea
After my previous project (Arduino 32x8 LED Matrix Info Display displaying date, time, temperature, humidity) I thought it would be interesting to build a more dynamic display which connects to the internet and can retrieve data from various websites.

The message board is built with an ESP32 microcontroller, 16 8x8 LED matrices, a temperature/humidity sensor and a rotary encoder to control what is displayed. The LED matrices are devided into 3 zones: time, alternating date and barometer info and the main message display. The Parola library is used for displaying the messages.

After powering up, the ESP32 connects to the local wifi network and a timeserver to get the local date and time and determines if Daylight Saving Time is active or not.

Then it loops through the main carousel, displaying full date, sunrise/sunset times for a city, current weather and forecast for several cities from Openweathermap.org, news headline feeds from Newsapi.org and stock data from www.alphavantage.co. The rotary controller lets you select several menu items for chosing what to display: the main carousel, several news categories or stock data. It is pretty basic, I intend to extend it in the future with submenus, etc.

The script can be localized and adjusted to display information from other cities, other websites or other sources.”

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