Completion date: 01 Jan 2012
Description: One of my earliest hobby projects
Tags: Electronics
Tools: Microcontrollers, Soldering, C programming

LED Matrices

I was first introduced to the world of hobby electronics and microcontrollers by a good friend of mine around 6th grade. We used to beg our parents to take us to Sayal (a local electronics shop) so we could recreate maker projects we saw on instructables.com/make.com — good times.

There was one project in particular that was very impactful on my learning journey that I like to share: an LED matrix. It was through this project that I graduated from “monkey-see monkey-do” to grasping the technical details by doing things my own way.

A matrix of LEDs driven by a microcontroller

I spent quite a while learning C/C++ in order to write a sketch that could display and scroll strings/patterns. And I’ll be honest, my code was wildly innefficient at first. But as I pushed myself to learn better constructs, I was able to incrementally improve it.

Wrote matrix library to help display patterns and scroll text

Rest assured that several mistakes were made, both in software and hardware. After getting a first version working, I eventually remade the project with all my learnings – cleaner soldering job, more efficient code, corrected circuitry, etc.

Two matrices – soldered hundreds of LEDs by hand

It was the hobby projects like this that taught me very useful fundamentals early on: soldering, electronics prototyping, programming. Who knew it would lead me to where I am today.