Building an LED “Ticker” Panel

This project involved making a large "ticker" style display out of LEDs that would display the current price of various crypto currencies. The panel itself is built out of strips of RGB LEDs and the unit contains the power supply and a microcontroller (esp8266) that communicates with the internet to poll the current price of various currencies set by the user via a web interface.

One challenge was to fit the programming logic in to the limited memory space in the microcontroller, as well as the difficulty of debugging it. I ended up first programming the major core parts in another higher level language, including the graphical output, font rendering, and the web communication and debugging it there before porting it, testing, and optimizing it for the microcontroller. Final program was written in C.

With the protoyping and testing done, I could go ahead with the actual build.

Timelapse of milling out the PCB on a PCB mill