A new guide in the Adafruit Learning System: MatrixPortal CircuitPython Animated Message Board.

Perhaps you’ve seen those animated message board signs and perhaps you even wanted one. However, you may have noticed they tend to be fairly pricey and programming them can be complicated.

This project makes use of the powerful Adafruit MatrixPortal S3 and its large memory capacity to be able to pump out and blend graphics in real time using CircuitPython. It works by using CircuitPython’s bitmaptools module along with displayio to blend, blit and buffer swap images and text together to produce smooth animations.

The code for this project is based on the OpenSign project, which was written for the Raspberry Pi, but was completely rewritten from scratch for this project to make use of strengths of CircuitPython. Certain features such as shadow and text stroke were omitted because of the lack of support at this time. Some library restructuring was also done to make it more expandable and avoid OpenSign’s large library files for memory efficiency.

See the new guide now…