There are many LED displays out there for the average hacker to use. They are all roughly similar in hardware, so often the differentiating features are in the software that backs them up. The newest revision of the Pixie Chroma is a smart, 2-digit, 5×7 display module that is easy to use but has extremely good software, making your projects easier to bring to life!
Lixie Labs have clearly put in a huge amount of work for this iteration. The two new headline features are Quad Mode (a way to drive batches of the displays in parallel for faster refresh) and Shortcodes (making displaying symbols or any character much simpler). I’m particularly interested in the Shortcodes; these function much like emojis do on chat platforms like Discord: you enter the name of a symbol surrounded by delimiters, and the software interprets it as a particular image. While the software has 240 Shortcodes built-in, they offer an awesome web-based editor for creating more.
Simply click the pixels to set the display you want, and then copy and paste the generated code into your project. No more graph paper and binary arithmetic! This allows the displays to be used for just about any application you can imagine.
Their documentation is excellent, and they currently support the ESP8266, ESP32, and Teensy 3.x. Support for the RP2040 and SAMD21 are planned. And the best part of all is this project is OSHWA-certified Open Hardware!
Check out their YouTube video to see just how smooth and gorgeous these displays are:
