We’ve just added three new products to the OzzMaker shop: a 16×16 RGB LED Matrix Panel, and small Raspberry Pi connector boards for our matrix, one which supports a LiPo battery built specifically to drive it.
The panel
The 16×16 RGB LED Matrix Panel uses the HUB75 signalling protocol, but with one important twist — instead of the awkward 16-pin IDC ribbon you’d normally wrestle with, our panels use a flat FFC cable for connections. That makes chaining panels together a lot less fiddly.
Below you can see 5 setup in a cross formation, being driven buy a Raspberry Pi with a OzzMaker RGB LED Matrix Connector with Lipo/Ii-Ion support.
Back of cross
You can chain 50+ panels in a long strip for scrolling text, or tile them into bigger square displays — 64×64 and beyond. Each panel has solder pads along its edges that act as anchor points: line two panels up side by side, match the pads, and flow solder across them to join the panels together — a bit like spot-welding. The result is a single rigid display rather than a loose array of separate boards
The panels are driven with hzeller’s open-source library, which is well-documented, actively maintained, and works with Python or C. We also have plenty of examples available for scrolling text, animations, (yes, including a Pac-Man animation), clocks, patterns, etc..
Raspberry Pi Connectors
We have two type of connectors which are used to connect the 16×16 RGB LED Matrix Panels to a Raspberry Pi.
- OzzMaker RGB LED Matrix Connector for Raspberry Pi
- OzzMaker RGB LED Matrix Connector for Raspberry Pi with Lipo/Ii-Ion support
Each connector is a small board that sits on the 40-pin GPIO header and gives you a clean, solder-free way to plug a panel straight into a Pi. No jumper wires, no IDC ribbon. It also breaks out the unused GPIO pins and adds a QWIIC connector for I²C accessories, so you can keep building on the same Pi. The second connector above has support for a Lipo/Li-Ion battery which allows you to power your Raspberry Pi and OzzMaker RGB LED matrix from a single 3.7V LiPo or Li-Ion battery. It also includes a charger!
They work with the Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2. Pi 5 support is in progress.
10 Panels chained
Click on the below image to see the video
Create a LED cube
Use 6 OzzMaker 16×16 RGB LED matric panels to create a LED cube.
The cube on the left below is using the OzzMaker RGB LED Matrix Connector for Raspberry Pi with Lipo/Ii-Ion support, connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero and a small 3.7V LiPo battery, all which is sitting inside the cube.
