bf777 / light-parser

A Python script that takes a (lowercase letter) string and parses the string into Arduino formatted data (in C) for output to a minimum 5 x 7 LED dot matrix module, flashed one letter at a time.

light-parser

A Python script that takes a (lowercase alphabetic) string and parses the string into Arduino formatted data for output to a minimum 8 x 5 LED dot matrix module, flashed one letter at a time. For use with MAX7219 and MAX7221 display drivers and the LedControl library.

How to use

$ python main.py

1. Input your string. Only lowercase Latin alphabetic characters are supported at this time.
2. Copy and paste the whole output into a blank file in the Arduino IDE.
3. Initialize your program with the LedControl library according to their documentation.
4. Compile and upload your code to Arduino.

Warnings

The letters are not pretty. If you have better ideas for more elegant letters, open a pull request for the binary letters. Each 8-bit value covers one 8-LED row or column of your display; letters are currently max 5 rows tall.

At the moment, if you type a word with repeated letters, you'll have to manually delete the duplicate binary code from BinaryDict.

Acknowledgements

This code was inspired by Elegoo's tutorial for the LED dot matrix parser, which can be found here, under "Elegoo UNO R3 The Most Complete Starter Kit" (please be warned that the file containing the tutorial is 500+ MB). At this time, some of the letters in BinaryDict are from the code in this file and may have rights held by Elegoo.