Since my last update there were 10 new guides published to the Adafruit Learning System. This week we published a couple new product guides including the MagTag, and Grayscale OLED Display. The Ruiz Brothers published some great 3d printed case designs for the BrainCraft Camera, and the MagTag. Check out the rest of the new guides here.
Favorite New Guide
This week my favorite new guide is a clever way to diffuse your RGB matrix displays.
An unpainted art canvas can make a great diffusion screen for RGB matrix panels. In this guide I’ll show how to use art canvases to construct wall-hanging matrix panel enclosures for several different sizes of RGB matrix panels.
This guide will help you to build one of these wall-hanging canvas displays.
ALS Deep Cut
The Adafruit Learning System has now 2,335 published guides! As you can imagine, some amazing guides of years past get buried and lost. ALS Deep Cuts brings these guides back up to the surface.
This weeks ALS Deep Cut was published back in July of 2012.
From the moment these LED displays made an appearance on our weekly Ask an Engineer show, comparisons were being made to the DeLorean time circuit from the Back to the Future films. It was a moral imperative then to make a demo! If you’re handy with Arduino and some shop tools, you should be able to pull off something similar (better, even), or adapt the ideas to other projects. This was quickly built in fun, so please don’t expect the same level of polish as a finished product tutorial.
New Product Guides
This week we have two new product guides. The first is for the new Adafruit MagTag.
The Adafruit MagTag combines the new ESP32-S2 wireless module and a 2.9″ grayscale E-Ink display to make a low-power IoT display that can show data on its screen even when power is removed! The ESP32-S2 is great because it builds on the years of code and support for the ESP32 and also adds native USB support so you can use this board with Arduino or CircuitPython!
The second is for the Adafruit Grayscale 1.5″ 128×128 OLED Display.
This OLED goes out to all the fans who want more pixels! Normally our 128×64 OLEDs are the biggest ones we’ve stocked that can use I2C. This one is a whopping 128×128 pixels and it even has an extra bonus – it can do grayscale pixels! Yep, you get the same crispness of a monochrome OLED but with 16 levels of gray.