I am looking for ideas on a wide area custom LED matrix

I have no idea what section to put this post.

The overview. I have 2, soon to be 3 large media shelves that I store DVDs and BDs. Each of the current 2 shelves has 7 rows of media. I haven't decided on a specific LED count, but hoping to have about 50+ LEDs per row. I will then need to be able to control each LED. Ultimately to light up 1 or more LEDs at a time and animating them would be nice as well.

I would like to interface to the Raspberry pi or PC. The final user interface would hopefully be a web application run by PHP and MySQL. As I will need to access the MySQL DB that I store my media in right now.

But the question here is about finding some ideas on driving the LEDs in a way to reduce wiring.

Even just 1 row of media with 50-100 single color LEDs would be too many wires to deal with if they all have to go to the end of a 36" wide row.

Wondering if there is a way to maybe chain together sets of LEDs with drivers that then can be chained together but still retain great LED control. With the hope that there are only a few connections to interface with per row and then of course be able to chain those together with other rows. AND be able to add more in the future for a 3rd shelve.

I don't know if that is enough details to get some ideas. So far all my searching has only yielded tightly configured LED Matrix setups.

You should consider DMX protocol it has 512 channels and you can make a sequences as you wish. For the LED driving side, there's a DMX controller (3 channel) with PIC16F88.
As from software side, Vixen, as the free program is a good candidate.

I forgot to mention a critical part of the whole point in doing this. Here are some examples. The 14 total rows (2 shelving units by 7 rows each) with media sorted by title alphabetically.

* Search for a specific title -> Only 1 LED lights up near the title
* Search for a series -> A few LEDs in a row light up
* Filter for all Comedy titles -> LEDs all over the place are lit up near titles that are comedy.

And last, I figured it would be cool to have a dance and idle mode. And those would do all kinds of programmed animations and patterns.

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ZASto said:

You should consider DMX protocol it has 512 channels and you can make a sequences as you wish. For the LED driving side, there's a DMX controller (3 channel) with PIC16F88.
As from software side, Vixen, as the free program is a good candidate.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input. Though I don't think that would be a practical DIY approach to this. And not sure how any that will solve the wiring issue of 50-100 LEDs in a 3 foot length with independent control of each LED.

I am hoping to find some kind of data bus method. So that each row can share a 2 to 5 wire "bus". And preferably that bus would be the same across all 7 rows per shelve stand. And that then maybe a simple small circuit that can drive possibly 10 or more LEDs. And then of course a way to address them all.

Let's say I use 60 LEDs per row (individual shelf of media), times 14 total (but more in the very near future), I then have 840 LEDs to control individually. Maybe that is crazy talk. But I would rather start high in my planning and work my way down. So with a 3rd shelving unit soon, that number would easily go over 1,000.

You need only 4 (four) wires for DMX. 2 (two) wires for power supply, eg. 5V and 2 (two) communication wires (DMX is based on RS-485 hardware, 250 kbps communication). If you outgrow 512 channels, nwxt universe is another 512
Just take a look what mrpackethead did in this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAt6A98lXQw

DMX looks like it is a good option for low wire count between DMX "remotes" or "clients". But if you have a strip of 100 independently controlled LEDs, do you need 101 wires? for that strip to the DMX unit? And then only 4 wires between each DMX unit. There may be no other option for the strips of LEDs. I was hoping there was a way to multiplex the strip to cut down on the number of wires. But it will likely be better and easier to just deal with 101 wires. Very thin wires.

With that in mind, I don't suppose any company already makes strips of LEDs for individual control. I know there are plenty of strips/bar/rope LEDs that have segments or are mean to just all light up at once.

You need a lot of microcontrollers, wirecount stays at 4 (four).
If your LEDs are RGB, on one DMX universe you can connect 170 pieces (170*3=510 channels). If the LEDs are mochromatic you can controll 512 LEDs on one DMX universe.