Requirements

Here is a list of parts you need. In this document I won't go into too much details, how to build your own wooden table. If you are not very good at dealing with woodwork, you could just buy a small table and put the LED matrix on top of it. Additionally, I will just give the general instructions to setup the hardware. You need to be able to solder a few connections!

To use this system with all its features, you need the following components:

• Table with a size of approx. 70 x 55 cm
• Raspberry Pi: I used a Raspberry Pi B+ for that job but it should work with any Linux based platform. Also tested with the new Raspberry Pi 3+ !
• LED-Strip: I used an WS2812B LED-Strip with 300 LED's (10 meter with 300 LED's, 3.33 cm spacing). The more LED's you use, the more power you need 😄!
• LED-Strip-Controller: To control the LED's strip, I used the Diamex LED-Player S2. Basically you should be able to use any USB-LED-Controller with minor tweaks but it has to have the following features:
  • It support the TMP2-Protocol. This is basically a binary protocol to control LED-Strips and -Matrices.
  • It has be connected via USB and should be displayed as serial COM port.
  • It should support enough LEDs! The controller I used, supports 256 or 512 LEDs (depending on the firmware version)!
• Power-Supply: Obviously, we need some kind of power supply to drive the full circuit in all possible scenarios (a bright white display requires the most power!). For that task, I used the MeanWell, RS-50-5. You need:
  • 5 Volt output voltage
  • 50 Watt to drive the LED matrix as well as the Raspberry Pi. If your amount of LED's differs strongly from my setup, you have to re-compute the requirements for your own setup!
• Pixel-Grid: We need some kind of grid layout that overlays the LED-Matrix. Otherwise we would see intermixed colors from adjacent cells instead of clear and sharp squared pixels as you can see on the start page of that Wiki. You can build your own grid by using wood. I was too lazy to build the grid that way and therefore I designed a 3D-printable grid segment with 3x4 pixels each. By printing the grid segment several times and gluing the parts together I got a perfectly flat grid with a resolution of 15 by 20 pixels. You can download the grid segment on Thingiverse. It can obviously just be used with the same LED density (150 LEDs per 5 meter).
• Glass: To cover the grid and the LEDs, you have to mount a glass plate on top of the grid. Try to find a frosted or somehow diffuse glass, that improves the illumination of each pixel cell by scattering the emitted light. In the perfect case, you have some kind of milky glass, that completely hides the actual grid underneath. The glass has to touch the grid everywhere, so that light that comes from a single pixel, does not shine into other pixels!
• Cables: You also need some basic equipment such as a USB-Cables and a few normal wires to connect everything.