Did this get figured out? Would like to use this.
Update:
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Would you mind linking the modules? I’ve looked around, but I have not found any useful guides.
I was writing my own program in C# and am using the serial bus to communicate to the board. however i am only able to get 13 “frames” / second when sending a full 0-255 greyscale output for all the LED’s. I’ve temporarily solved this by just sending on or off commands an dim able to get ~66fps but in your video you seem to be able to do 30 or more fps while still sending a greyscale image. How did you achieve this?
It can be tough to reliably get a good framerate with the default LED Matrix firmware and its serial interface. There are a couple alternative firmwares that get higher frame rates easier, such as the one Sigroot posted earlier in this thread, or this one that uses USB HID: GitHub - vddCore/sparkle-fw16: Alternate firmware for Framework Laptop 16 LED matrix modules. · GitHub
heckseven’s project uses the default LED Matrix firmware. Here, Claude seems to have identified one of the issues. I see that they’re on baud rate 921600, which frankly I didn’t even know was possible, I was always on 115200. What baud rate were you using?
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Dark Matrix is awesome !! thanks !!
I tried different baud rates up to 115200 but it made no difference so i assumed it was some sort of hardware limitation
Baud rate doesn’t matter because it is a USB transfer over a virtual serial port.
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there wasn’t much of a trick to it other than just not using grayscale for most things. almost all of the animations used have no grayscale as it noticeably slows things down. i considered custom firmware, but wanted this to be easy for nontechnical folks to set up and use.
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High refresh rate (60hz+) full grayscale with
- volume/mute indicator
- system resources usage
- battery indicator that suggests remaining capacity, charge/discharge rate, and for how long it has already been charging/discharging with a single glance
- clock
- smooth compact workspace pills slider
- per-pixel overview workspace scrolling
- power cable & headphone plugging effects
- audio visualizer with media player album art/title integration
I think the battery indicator might also need some extra explaining how it does that. When the cable is plugged in, the plug location is aligned to the battery indicator and it “drips” pixels into the side correlated to charge rate, piling up in a pile of pixels. If the “hill” of pixels is convex, that means it has been charging for decent chunk of time. Likewise, discharging bubbles up and evaporates the pixels in the opposite direction out of the port. It evaporates from the center, which hollows out the pile of sand over time. How vigorously it bubbles up and evaporates is based on discharge rate.
Many of the other effects are also physically inspired like that. For example, the audio visualizer includes refraction of light through a wave pool driven by sound, and uncorking the plugs on the side gives a fluid-like vorticity.
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Pretty cool. I’d heart your post, but you didn’t put any link to where to download the software.
I put it up on a repo although it is arranged specifically for my setup. Also I should mention all of it is AI generated: firmware patch, Gnome extension, and systemd service.