Main Content

A DIY home-made giant 10 x 10 LED board, it’s bright, colourful and cool.

I have been excited about LEDs for a long time and decided that I would create some sort of LED matrix or board. I bought the LEDs back in November 2019 but really struggled to get them working with the Raspberry Pi and Python code. However, thanks to Lorraine Underwood

I got started, wired them up and created a short program to flash them on and off. To wire the LEDs correctly you need to check for the data arrow indicating in which direction the data flows. This is not the same across all the LED chains, I even purchased three sets of 50 from the same manufacturer and the data was different on each.

The full build of the LED board was a lot of fun. I have made a video that shows all the stages, getting the bottles ready, spraying them, attaching them to the bed slates, creating the frame, fitting it altogether. Sticking and spraying 100 bottles was not fun and become very boring so I set myself 20 a day, although I stuck all the bottles in place over two evenings. Thanks to Tim Morris who helped me in his workshop to create the frame and sand it down. Thanks also to Martin Mander for his clever idea to spray the bottles white to diffuse the LED glow across the bottle. This means that you can look at the board without getting blinded, saving you from a headache and also your eyes!”

Link to article