32x32 RGB LED Matrix Panel - 4mm Pitch

Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this totally adorable 5 inch square 32 x 32 RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, here in New York Adafruit see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. Adafruit thought they looked really cool so they picked up a few boxes of them from a factory. They have 1024 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 32x32 grid on the front with 4mm grid spacing. On the back there is a PCB with two sets of dual IDC connectors (two input, two output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:16 scan rate.

Of course, Adafruit wouldn't leave you with a datasheet and a "good luck!" Adafruit have tutorials and add-on boards that will make connecting and usage very easy!

Comes with:

• Single 32x32 RGB panel
• One 2x8 IDC cable
• Power cable

RAM & Processor Requirements

Keep in mind that these displays were designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you're supposed to redraw the screen over and over to 'manually' PWM the whole thing.

You'll need about 1600 bytes of RAM to buffer the 12-bit color image. You cannot use this size panel with an Arduino UNO (ATmega328) or ATmega32u4 - you need a chip with more RAM! These displays are technically 'chainable' - connect one output to the next input - as long as you have the RAM and CPU to handle it

This display does best with a high speed, high RAM microcontroller like a SAMD21, SAMD51, ESP32, etc. 8-bit micros are going to struggle if they work at all. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs it's not a particularly tinted white.

Power Requirements

There's a lot of LEDs! You may need up to 4A per panel. We suggest Adafruit's 4A regulated 5V adapter and then connecting a 2.1mm jack. Please check out Adafruit's tutorials for more details!

Connection Requirements

These displays require 13 GPIO pins to control. You may have to use consecutive or special pins depending on the driver firmware. We'll be honest: folks who try to wire directly are usually not successful, its easy to get confused and misconnect. For that reason Adafruit strongly recommend a ready-to-go board or adapter that makes wiring as easy as plugging in the cables and powering with 5V

• Adafruit recommend the Matrix Portal ESP32-S3 for a WiFi-enabled powerful plug-and-play board
• The original Matrix Portal with SAMD51 is also a great plug-and-play board if you happen to want a Cortex M4 as a main processor (we recommend the S3 version, above, as it is faster and has more memory)
• For many Arduino-shaped boards, you may be able to use Adafruit's RGB Matrix Shield (check the product page and tutorial for which Arduino-like boards can be used)
• We also have RGB Matrix FeatherWings for many Feather boards (check the product page and tutorial for which Feather boards can be used)
• For Raspberry Pi computers, Adafruit's RGB Matrix Bonnet is fully plug-and-play for powerful Linux-controlled displays.

Adafruit have also got Adafruit's great Protomatter library that works in Arduino and CircuitPython for quick usage of many chained matrices.

Please note! These panels are remainder stock from factories that make huge light boards. For that reason, the look and size might vary from batch to batch, even though the basic operation, codebase and tutorial is the same.

Technical Details

• CAD Drawing