Here’s another resource for working with animated gifs on all sorts of matrix displays (not just their hardware project) from the Adafruit community. And a special shout out to our NeoPixel Uberguide. Displaying Animated GIFs onto a 16 x 16 WS2812B Matrix:
There’s an easy way to download animated GIFs onto MeU and if you really wanted to, you can use our code for any 16×16 NeoPixel matrix. This tutorial assumes you know how to work with Processing, Arduino and Teensy. All required code and libraries are on our github page.
Hardware required:
- 16×16 WS2812B (NeoPixel) Matrix
- Teensy 3.1
- 3.7V lithium ion battery
To learn more about how to setup a WS2812B or NeoPixel matrix and to learn more about the Arduino libraries written, check out the Uberguide written by Adafruit.
Software required:
Pixels from an image file (gif, jpeg, tiff, png, bmp, etc) can be broken down into red, green, and blue values which is how the WS2812B led displays a specific colour. Using this principle we came up with a Processing sketch to convert an animated gif file into an Arduino sketch that you can then download on to a 16×16 WS2812B matrix. In order for the sketch to work properly, the gif file needs to be 16px by 16px otherwise the Processing sketch will not work. The best way to find 16×16 pixel animated gifs is to do a google image search and use search tools to find exact sizes and animation…..