Most makers have experience with strip LEDs, but some pretty amazing things happen when you add an extra dimension. Today, we're nailing control with LED matrices - all without code! This guide demonstrates the fastest and most customizable way to have low-bit 8x8 grids come alive exactly how you want. These are fully addressable LED grids, perfect for tiling, built in-house and Australian-made - proper rad!

Even better, because we're using WLED with an ESP32 Dev board, control is done wirelessly with a single click. Furthermore, this will demonstrate how you can drag and drop any pixel art you want to your grid. Hey gang, Tamir Core Electronics and nothing beats bright, shiny, colourful lights!

To be clear, this guide will be all about controlling any fully addressable LED Grid or Matrix in any shape using an expressive ESP32 or ESP8266 development board. These development boards are the best way to get Wi-Fi connectivity into your projects. This means your mobile phone or computer will then be able to tell the LED nodes exactly what to do, or through the local Wi-Fi with a simple press of a button.

This guide will demonstrate how to set up WLED for a single Glowbit Matrix (that's 64 nodes on this one 8x8) and provide you all the knowledge to take it to the next level with a 3x3 grid of them, exactly like this. This right here is nine Glowbit Matrix 8x8 components put together, totalling 576 LED nodes.

By the end of this guide, you're going to know how to display any pixel art you want with no code. Furthermore, the guide is going to make clear how to inject extra power into an LED system, that way you can feel confident in lighting more than 30 LED nodes from any ESP development board. I will even explain how to portabilize your WLED system by making it battery-powered. To follow along... description

With today's electronic recipe, this is what you're going to need: an ESP32 or ESP8266 board. In this guide, I've used the Adafruit Hazzar ESP8266. You will need a GloBit Matrix 8x8. It is worth noting that there are many types of WS2812B RGB Neopixel fully addressable grids that will work using this guide. You could even create a huge grid by lining up sections of one-meter RGB LED strips into square or rectangular shapes.

You will also need a 5 Volt 2 amp power supply, a DC Barrel Jack adapter, and jumper cables to connect all the hardware together. For this, we will need to inject extra power and connect the GloBit Matrix 8x8 to the ESP8266 development board. Do this by soldering on connectors to the GloBit Matrix 8x8, like I'm doing here. I have cut the DuPont wires in half, stripped them slightly, twisted and wrapped them, and finally soldered them directly on. Note that there are two ground wires and only one green data in wire and one red power wire.

Having done so, wire up the Matrix to the ESP8266 board. I've connected the DIN pin to GPIO2 pin and the edge pin ground to the ground pin on the ESP8266. Finally, attach the DC Barrel Jack to the middle positive and negative wires. Make sure to connect this correctly, noting the symbols written on the jack. This method of injecting extra power is appropriate for any setup which has more than 30 nodes. This method of setting up can work for very long LED strips as well, just replace the GloBit Matrix with a line of addressable LEDs.

With all wires connected up, plug in your power supply to the DC Barrel Jack, then connect up the USB to USB micro cord into your computer and the ESP8266. WLED is the ticket to make this all happen without code. I have already made a guide about this, flashing the software to the ESP32 and installing the phone app, so hit that guide up by clicking down in the description.

Once you can get your LED lights to turn on and respond to you via the phone app, there are lots of great troubleshooting tips to be found there too. Make sure to install the most recent version of WLED. Now is a great time to set up our parameters for 2D grid control inside the WLED app. Access the WLED system and click on the settings menu, then click on 2D configurations. If you're running a single 8x8 Globit module, fill out the form exactly like this, then press save.

Nice! We can now select any of the options in the effects section and your grid is going to light up appropriately. All options that work really well with grids will have a little grid symbol next to their name. Options without that grid symbol will also work really well. All these options are just one click away. Most effects are going to have sliders that will change the speed, size, or intensity of the effect, and most will let you choose exactly what colors you want.

One of the greatest things about Globit Matrix modules is how easy they are to tile them together by soldering them. Also, note that LEDs always look better with a diffuser and square boxes around each particular node. That way, the round emitters turn into square colorful boxes that fill up the space completely, kinda like having big pixels on a television screen. Doing this really amplifies the effect. So, I 3D printed a case and diffuser grids using the Ultimaker 2 Plus and soldered 9 Globit matrices together. Once assembled, the results look spectacular. Check the article for exactly how I did this and all the STL files if you want it replicated.

And just check out some of these beautiful effects when we use our larger 3x3 matrix. It's really a lot of fun. There are heaps of preset effects inside WLED. It took me a week.

We all want to explore the possibilities of our favourite retro game characters lighting up our display. To do this, we need to use pixel art, as the more pixels you have, the better the result. In this part of the guide, I'm going to demonstrate how to do this on the 3x3 Globit Matrix display.

The plugin to add this functionality comes from Work Strong and his project WLED Pixel Art Converter. The link to his project's GitHub is down below. To start this process, set your WLED display to a solid colour, then navigate to the GitHub page and download the packages. Unzip the downloaded files (the desktop is a perfectly fine place to do so) and open them with a file explorer. Now navigate into the HTML folder and double-click on the file that says pixelartmin.html. This will open up a web interface that we can use to directly communicate with our WLED system.

Fill out the web interface like you can see me doing here. I have 24 nodes, so I'll type 24. The IP address can be found in the WLED app. Having done that, drop in the image you would like to have displayed. With that pulled in, select the next option, 'Convert to WLED JSON'. Doing so creates a long text string that will get sent to WLED, and a preview of what will be displayed on your grid can be seen below. With that all done, simply press 'Send to Device' and you're going to have your new custom pixel art displayed gorgeously on your WLED grid.

This is a very recent development and I expect it to get better and better, likely to become fully integrated with WLED. But if you do the following, you can have absolutely any image displayed on your setup using WLED. It's so good - check out some of the other results!

I achieved as well as some fine art that I stuck into there too. Write down in the comments below if you can identify them. A quick point to add before the end of this video: a common question I see asked is how to battery power this. So you can make a portable W LED system, utilize an Adafruit Hazar 32 Featherboard or a Thing Plus ESP32 board and any 3.7 volt LiPo battery. This can be achieved very quickly and very easily.

Looking from above, you can see exactly what things I plugged it into. These special boards come with a port to directly plug in LiPo batteries and sport voltage and current regulation circuitry on the board. This means your system will automatically turn off once your LiPo batteries have drained to a safe point. This feather board is also going to charge the LiPo battery when you plug the whole system into a powered USB port. Do this and you're going to have Blinky fully adjustable LEDs on the go and that's that.

I am a full-time maker with great knowledge of Blinky lights and until next time, stay cozy.