The LED panel is here
It's here. The LED panel for the TCG Marquee board showed up today, and it's the part this whole project started with.
What arrived
A 128x64 pixel LED panel: 8,192 full color LEDs, 2.5 mm apart, in a panel about 320 by 160 mm (roughly 12.6 by 6.3 inches). It's the same kind of panel used for signs and scoreboards, and it's what the board on the home page is drawn to look like. It gets driven by an Adafruit MatrixPortal S3, a small Wi-Fi board that plugs into the back of the panel.
Running blind until now
The board itself arrived first, and its software has been in the works for weeks without a screen to draw on. Everything it would have shown went to a log on my computer instead. That's not nothing. It already:
- Joins your Wi-Fi from your phone. It makes its own setup network, and you pick your Wi-Fi from a page on your phone.
- Links to your account with a code, the same way the Apple TV app does.
- Downloads your wall in batches, 40 pages at a time in one request. That got a full load down from 90 seconds to under 8.
- Updates itself over Wi-Fi, and if a new version won't start, it rolls back to the one that worked.
- Knows your time zone, so it dims at night on its own, even if your internet goes down.
So the pages are ready. Now they need somewhere to go.
Next steps
- One small solder job. A panel with 64 rows needs one more address line than smaller panels, and the MatrixPortal has a jumper for it that has to be soldered closed. Skip it and only half the rows light up.
- Power. The panel gets its own 5 volt supply. A full panel of white LEDs pulls a lot more than a USB port can give.
- The first firmware that draws to the panel, loaded over USB the first time, then updated over Wi-Fi like any other version after that.
- Real cards on it. Card art, prices, the 7 and 30 day change, the movers, and the ticker scrolling along the bottom, all drawn by the same code that makes the home page preview.
Then the part I'm most curious about: how card art actually looks at 128 by 64, how bright is too bright in a dark room, and how readable it is from across a show floor.
Follow along
I'll post pictures and video as soon as it lights up. If there's something you want to see on it first, a certain card, a page, a game, tell me in the Discord or through Feedback in the app. Not in the beta? Request an invite.