UNO R4 LED Matrix animations

What you’re building

Arduino_LED_Matrix is the official core library for the 12-by-8 LED matrix built into UNO R4 WiFi. Its examples show several rendering paths: fixed frames, a mutable frame buffer, stored multi-frame animations, text through ArduinoGraphics, live preview, and Conway’s Game of Life. A sketch creates an ArduinoLEDMatrix object, starts the matrix, and either renders frame data directly or loads a generated sequence and plays it, optionally with automatic frame advance. The expected outcome is an animation, icon, text, or small visualization displayed without any external circuit; the MatrixIntro example pairs the shipped heart animation with the board’s built-in status LED. Compatibility is intentionally narrow: the library directory contains an UNO R4-only marker and the Flashable source points into ArduinoCore-renesas. The practical constraint is the tiny 96-pixel canvas, so artwork and frame sequences must be encoded in the library’s expected format and designed for severe resolution limits.

Key steps

1. Install or update the Arduino Renesas Boards core and select Arduino UNO R4 WiFi in Arduino IDE.
2. Open an official Arduino_LED_Matrix example such as DisplaySingleFrame, MatrixFrameBuffer, PlayAnimation, MatrixIntro, or a text example.
3. For animation, keep the generated frame array in animation.h, include Arduino_LED_Matrix.h, create ArduinoLEDMatrix, and call loadSequence with that array.
4. Call matrix.begin and matrix.play in setup; enable autoscroll with a millisecond interval only when the chosen sequence should advance automatically.
5. Upload over USB and verify the 12-by-8 matrix output, then replace the sample frames or text while retaining the example’s data format and 96-pixel dimensions.