I'm starting to document a project I've been working on for the last year. This is an evolution of the seven-segment display project. Now with more LEDs.

The 12-bit Internet Window is a low resolution, high brightness, wifi-enabled display. It's main components are:

Four 64x32 pixel RGB LED matrix panels
A Particle Photon
A custom interface board
Mounting hardware
Power supply

The interface board uses a CPLD to bridge SPI data from the Particle Photon microcontroller and the 6-wide parallel shift register interface required by the panel. This allows the microcontroller to use hardware timers and DMA to keep the display refreshed with minimal CPU overhead.

This project is largely enabled by Adafruit and their wonderful tutorials. I referenced their tutorials frequently during my design.

You can find the firmware and hardware design files on github. You can also follow this project on hackaday.io.

I'm in the process of putting together a few kits of all the necessary hardware. For now, I'm sharing them with firmware engineers willing to contribute to the open-source libraries and examples.