Electronic – How to drive about 440 LED’s without breaking the bank

led

Alright, I'm trying to create I guess an LED matrix display(?) so that I can make essentially a text display using 8×5 LEDs per letter, to make 11 letters in total. I'm definitely willing to learn a lot and NEED to learn a lot as I have little experience with something like this. My goal is to be able to display individual letters to make the display show like "Hey there" using 5×8 LEDs for each letter.

I'm looking to use possibly an arduino device, but as they have limited inputs, and I need about 440 inputs.. how would I make this work? I've researched a bit and it seems I could do something related to this https://www.circuitspecialists.com/blog/build-8×8-led-matrix . Would this be my best bet maybe? How would I extend this from 64 to 440 in terms of delivering it to the arduino device?

Also I would like to ask what arduino device might be best for this, and what accessories I might need that aren't mentioned in that page, if the provided link is a good idea.

Edit: Sorry for being somewhat vague. I'd be using 5mm Red LEDs and I only need to be able to turn on and off each individual LED. https://www.circuitspecialists.com/bag-red5mm.html

Best Answer

I would start the design by looking for off-the-shelf LED driver IC (ie. google "led matrix ic").

For example the LE171596A allows you to control 96 LEDs, so you would need ~5 of them. The chip costs around $9 at Mouser.

The driver allows you to turn on and off a single LED (or groups of them), so in order to display anything meaningful you need to update the driver registers all the time (think: just like dynamically driving a 7-segment LED display). To achieve that you need a fast MCU with SPI and DMA. It may be too much for a classic AVR (like ATmega328), but an Xmega could do it. Also pretty much any Cortex-M with DMA is suitable for this task.

Once you figure out what to build (the components) you need to lay them out on a PCB. I guess that 4-layers will be the minimum to get any decent spacing between the LEDs. Fortunately you can order them easily for China.

You've chosen THT LEDs - this brings the problem, that if you pack them tightly there will be no space for other components on the other side of the PCB (capacitors, driver ICs). SMD LEDs are much more suitable for matrix displays.

Finally you also need a low-voltage high-current power supply. These are also available off-the-shelf (eg. MeanWell). If the voltage is too high the drivers will dissipate too much power (and go into self-protection or blow up).