BixelPitch/smartrix

Turn your MAX7219 matrix into a smart display with the power of micropython and deno.

Smartrix

Turn your MAX7219 matrix into a smart display with the power of micropython and deno.

Features

• Plugin support! Extend the features of your smartrix by writing your own plugins.
• An emulator in your terminal, so you don't need the hardware to run this project.

Current plugins

• clock
• game of life
• cpu monitor

Prerequisites

• VSCode (optional but recommended)
• esptool
• The micropython binaries for your esp32. You can download these here: https://micropython.org/download/
• Deno

Getting started

In the next part <PORT> is referenced. This is your serial port, where your esp32 is connected to your computer. This information varies across the operating systems, but there are a lot tutorials out there which help you to find out, how your serial port is named.

1. Download or clone this repository.
2. Download the micropython firmware for your board and place this right beneath this readme file.
3. Erase the flash on your esp32 with esptool.py --port <PORT> erase_flash
4. Now flash the firmware with esptool.py --chip esp32 --port <PORT> write_flash -z 0x1000 esp32.bin assuming you are in the directory, where you downloaded the firmware from step 2. In this example it is named esp32.bin.
5. Create a wifi.py file and place it inside the src folder. Paste in the following and replace "ssid" with your SSID (The name of your wifi) and "password" (The password of your wifi):

SSID = 'ssid'
PASS = 'password'

6. Copy the code to your esp32 with rshell -p <PORT> rsync -m src/. /pyboard/ assuming your current directory is the root dir of this repository.
7. Open up a console and navigate to the path where you extracted this repository
8. run deno run --allow-net --allow-run deno/main.ts --host <host> where host is the ip of your esp32 board in your network.
9. You should see someting on your LED matrix! Once you flashed the software to the hardware, no connection to your computer is required anymore.

Optional configuration

In addition to deno run --allow-net --allow-run deno/main.ts you can tweak some settings:

flag	default value	description
--host	none	if set, smartrix runs in online mode. Specify the ip address of your esp32.
--port	8080	specifies the tcp port of the esp32.
--rate	500	sets the refresh rate in ms.
--alwaysUpdate	false	by default, the screen is only updated, if the content to display has changed. If you want to update every tick, set this to true.
--brightness	15	sets the brightness of you matrix module. Range is between 0-15. Has no effect when run in offline mode.
--rotation	6	defines how long one plugin is displayed in ticks. The duration of one tick is defined with the --rate option. If you set a rate of 500 and a rotation of 6, every 3 seconds the plugins rotate.