Prettige Kerst, Merry X-Mas, of course in style, by using a Xilinx FPGA to control a cheap 64x32 RGB LED matrix display.
I wrote a small program in VHDL that shift out a image to the RGB module and takes care of everything. After building it with Xilinx Vivado the resulting schematic looks like this;
Of course if this is not an example of how to do things for a real project, first of all the LED module lacks features like PWM control, current correction, over temperature protection, and simply the needed brightness compared to professional displays that are for example produced by my one of my clients. Secondly the VHDL is a bunch of n00b code, it doesn’t even have a way to control the display content, it just displays a static image. But since I am a C++ engineer by trade, learning an additional language that is very different in many ways isn’t a bad thing to do during a locked down X-Mas holiday.