Almost two years ago now I started planning and building a custom LED matrix to be controlled by my Arduino Duemilanove which sports an ATMega328 microprocessor. I used four Max7221 chips that I knew from a previous project and daisy-chained them to control the four 8×8 sections of my 16×16 matrix.

Arduino is an awesome rapid development and prototyping platform for learning to use and appreciate microcontrollers. Their boards contain a USB controller for power supply and programming from a PC, some status LEDs and pin sockets for interfacing to external hardware, all at a very affordable price. They have recently moved to the Arduino Uno (different USB controller, but still based on the ATMega 328) and version 1.0 of the software. Once I package my code as a library I’ll also check that it’s compatible with the new version.
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