This is the 1016 LED Message Board kit from Cheerful Electronic. With this kit you can make your own custom sign to show small texts, scrolling texts and messages with fun animations on 10 large 16-segment LED displays. It will make a very cool display that you can customize to make a message feed ticker, escape room display, score board or any kind of sign you want. The Message Board is really easy to use, programming is optional and even connecting it to an Arduino or another development board is optional.

Using the Message Board

You don't need any special software or Arduino code libraries to make the Message Board work. The Message Board communicates with your Arduino using the two serial pins Tx and Rx. Showing some text on screen is as simple as:

Serial.begin(9600); Serial.println("hello");

If your text fits on screen then the Message Board will show it as a static text, but if your text has more than 10 characters it will automatically scroll your message across the screen. To make things more intersting there are 16 differernt animations that you can use to show texts of up to 10 characters. The text string that you send to the Message Board can contain simple formatting to tell it what animation to use, how quick to scroll, how to align text and to set a delay between parts of a message. For example:

Serial.println("{a99tc}hello{d1000}world{d1000}{a3} ");

Shows the words HELLO and WORLD with a random animation (a99) centered on screen (tc). There is a delay of 1 second between HELLO and WORLD (d1000) and finally the screen is cleared with an animation from top to bottom (a3) before the message starts over.

You can store one message in NVRAM as the default message to display. This message will show every time you power up the Message Board until you send it some new text. The manual goes into more detail about the text format and how to connect the Message Board.

What do you need?

The Message Board can be used with any Arduino or any other development board that has a serial connector.

When you connect the Message Board to your computer it will show up as a serial port. You can connect to it using terminal software such as Tera Term and directly send the text you want to display. The manual will show you how in more detail. No programming required to make a cool display!

About the kit

The kit contains all the parts that you need to build the Message Board: PCB, components and 3D printed feet to stand the Message Board up right. The PCB has a micro USB connector that has already been soldered to the board so you don't have to worry about soldering tiny SMD pins. A micro USB cable is not included in the kit because most people have some spare cables lying around anyway.