MAX7219 Dot Matrix Display - 4 in 1 Integrated Display, SCM Control Drive, LED, Electronic Components, 5V

For the price, I had to try these...About 15 years ago, I looked at something like this and was turned off by the $125 price tag. It is awesome how inexpensive these have become.I've tried these with Arduino and with ESPHome. It is very nice that the libraries for both include a brightness setting from 0 to 15, cuz they can be painfully bright. I will be using at least one of them for advertising/notices pointing outside and will probably set them to 15 when I deploy them, but as I poke around with the code on the workbench, I set them to brightness setting 1 and it's still pretty intense.It's the libraries I've found, but so far they all have two identical weaknesses - when the text scrolls, the code removes all whitespace at the end of the string. This means the last and first words touch as it repeats the scroll. Both libraries also pause for almost a whole second when the message restarts.

It works remarkably well for how little it cost. The order was two of these displays for what would normally be charged for just one anywhere else. My only issue is a minor issue, and that's the fact the pins are loose in the bag and not soldered on the board. I did the soldering myself in five minutes, and was then able to work with the display. I have mine connected to an Espressif ESP32-S3 DevKitC1 N8R8 purchased from Amazon running Micropython 1.22.1, with a MAX7219 library I found on GitHub.

This display was easy to set up and get working, I utilized an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with CircuitPython installed, and used the adafruit_max7219 library - everything works as expected. Would recommend for anybody looking for this type of display.

The media could not be loaded.  This is a nice package which includes straight and 90 degree headers for connecting it. The wires were also included, female to female. As you can see from the video, I hooked it up to an esp32 and ran a sample Arduino sketch. With most of the samples, keep in mind that you'll need to use the default pins for the SPI bus unless you like hacking header files. Overall great value for the money and I'm designing a case right now to house it all. As you you will also notice, I was driving it from the 5 volt pin on the ESP32 without any dropout. I haven't measured the total load or if lighting every pixel will brown out, but that's a mystery for another day.Enjoy!

Best dot matrix display I have. I have got a few different ones on here and this one is by far the best and easiest to set up. As soon as I come up with a little more cash I will be ordering 15 more of these to make a Pac Man arcade game with them.

3Pcs MAX7219 Dot Matrix Module 4 in 1.All 3 boards work well and are built solid. Fast delivery from US to Canada at a price which can not be beaten!Thankyou!!