Discontinued - you can grab this Medium 16x32 RGB LED matrix panel - 6mm Pitch instead!

These LED panels take care of all the work of making a big matrix display. Each panel has six 8x8 red matrix modules for a 16x24 matrix. The panel has an HT1632C chip on the back which does all the multiplexing work for you and has a 3-pin SPI-like serial interface to talk to it and set LEDs on or off (you cannot set the LED to be individually dimmed, as in 'grayscale'). There are a few extras as well, such as being able to change the brightness of the entire display or blink the entire display at 1 Hz.

One really nice thing about this particular LED matrix module is that it is designed to be 'chainable' - you can connect to 8 panels together to make an extra long display.

Comes with one fully assembled and ready-to-go panel and a 10-pin IDC cable. You will need a microcontroller to control the display, our tutorial uses an Arduino, but nearly any microcontroller with 3 digital output pins can be used. If you want to chain two displays, you can use the two IDC cables in the packages to connect them. But for 3+ chained displays, you will need more cables - check the tutorial and search for "How many cables do I need?" for an explanation.

And, of course, we have written a full tutorial and Arduino library that not only takes care of controlling the display, it also intelligently handles chained displays so that they appear to be one long matrix. The library has functions for drawing pixels, lines, rectangles, circles, and text. You'll be making it light up in 15 minutes!