Blog

Apr 15, 2023

Mt Tedious Is a Massive LED Wall Display

With every display technology, there is a balance between resolution, screen

With every display technology, there is a balance between resolution, screen size, and cost. Your iPhone screen is small and has a high enough resolution that the pixels are too tiny for the human eye to distinguish — but Retina displays are expensive. At the complete opposite end of the spectrum you have LED matrix displays, which can be manufactured at a very large size and low cost, but that also have low resolutions. Redditor ThisHatFitsFine took advantage of that to build this huge LED wall display and its name, Mt Tedious, describes their experience with the project.

ThisHatFitsFine started their trek up Mt Tedious after buying a house. They wanted to decorate one of the rooms with a vaporwave aesthetic and thought that a large LED matrix panel would make a good addition. But they couldn't find any panels for sale that were big enough for their tastes. That forced them onto this long, arduous, and expensive journey. Mt Tedious ended up costing around $600 to complete, but the result seems to have been worth the effort and credit card bill.

Unlike conventional LED matrices that utilize a literal matrix circuit, Mt Tedious uses WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs. Most people refer to those by Adafruit's NeoPixel trademark and the benefit is that a user can control a huge number of RGB LEDs using only a single pin on a microcontroller. Those LEDs form a long chain and the microcontroller can set a specific LED's color and brightness by simply addressing it by its position in the chain. As is the case with most projects, Mt Tedious has the LED strips arranged in a serpentine pattern to cover the whole 2D plane.

That plane is a 4x4 foot square board and the LEDs form a 32x32 grid for a total of 1,024 LEDs. The project got its name because ThisHatFitsFine had to spend a lot of time building the dividers that isolate the LEDs. They constructed those from plywood and they create a pixelated effect, as opposed to allowing the LEDs to bleed together. Each LED shines through a black plastic tile for diffusion.

An Arduino controls the LEDs, but ThisHatFitsFine doesn't specify the model. The LEDs consume a lot of power and required a beefy 60A power supply. Mt Tedious can display whatever image ThisHatFitsFine chooses, they just have to scale it down to the 32x32 resolution and set the LEDs to those pixel colors.