What is it?

A shield (an add-on board) that fits the popular ESP8266-based D1 Mini, D1 Mini Pro and D1 Mini Lite development boards produced by WeMos. You put it on top of them, and it gives you a bright display of 8 by 8 shining dots in your chosen color. By communicating with the shield over I2C protocol (preferably using one of the available libraries) you can switch the individual pixels on or off, change the brightness of the whole display, or make the whole display blink.

Please note that I have to ship them with the pin headers unsoldered. You will have to solder them onto the boards yourself! This is because the shields would be too big to send as a letter with the headers on, and the shipping cost would then be greater than the price of the shield.

Why did you make it?

The OLED shield available from WeMos is great, but not suitable for all projects. This shield is better if you need to have something really bright and visible from a distance. You can use it to display icons, numbers, scrolling text and other indicators. You can also make a simple game such as Snake, Flappy Bird, Tetris, Pong or Arkanoid. Various animations and visualisations, such as an equalizer display, are also possible.

What makes it special?

Nothing. From the electronics point of view is practically the same as the mini LED backpacks sold by Adafruit. It has the same HT16K33 chip and it works with the same libraries and example code. It's just a little bit smaller and more convenient to put on top of a D1 Mini.

Resources

Libraries:

• Arduino library and examples (use the d1matrix example)
• MicroPython library
• CircuitPython library

There is a simple example project here: https://hackaday.io/project/20839-weather-pal