You will chirp with delight when you see how easy it is to make your very own 8x16 LED matrix display for any Feather. This kit combines two of our adorable miniature LED matrices with a FeatherWing driver board. At 0.8" square, these little 8x8 matrices have got everything a big LED matrix has, but bite sized! Double them up for 128 total bright blue LEDs.

Normally, wiring up 8x16 matrices would require a breath-taking 24 GPIO pins, which is way too many pins. That's where this lovely 16x8 LED matrix backpack PCB comes in. It contains a HT16K33 I2C LED matrix driver that does all the multiplexing work for you, and is controlled over the two I2C pins. It's easy to use, has a portable library that runs on any of our Feathers to turn on/off each LED.

The 16x8 backpack is also great for making scrolling displays or small video displays.  In our example, we set it up to display small bitmap emoticons but you can also display text that moves - kind of like a sign in front of a miniature car dealership.

This kit comes with:

• A fully tested and assembled 16x8 0.8" LED FeatherWing 
• 2 x ultra-bright square 8x8 blue matrices
• 2 x 16-pin header

A bit of soldering is required to attach the two matrices onto the FeatherWing but its very easy to do and only takes about 15 minutes. Check out our tutorial for assembly instructions, pinouts, CircuitPython and Arduino library code, schematics and more!