Arduino MAX7219 LED Matrix Scrolling Message Display

OVERVIEW
Quite a while ago, I did a tutorial on how to create a Scrolling Text using a MAX7219 LED Matrix and an Arduino.
It worked, but the library I used at the time was very limited and hard to modify how the text scrolls across multiple matrix modules.
So I decided to make this new tutorial but this time using a more flexible library which provides more options.
The library in question is the ‘Parola’ library by MajicDesigns.

In this tutorial, I will use six MAX7219 LED matrix linked together with a slider potentiometer to control the direction and speed of the scrolling text in real-time.

CIRCUIT SCHEMATIC

DESCRIPTION

Now let’s take a closer look at the MAX7219 driver.

The VCC and GND of the module go to the 5V and GND pins of the Arduino and the three other pins, DIN, CLK, and CS go to any digital pin of the Arduino board. If we want to connect more than one module we just connect the output pins of the previous breakout board to the input pins of the new module. Actually these pins are all the same except that the DOUT pin of the previous board goes to the DIN pin of the new board.

The 64 LEDs are driven by 16 output pins of the IC. The question now is how is that possible. Well, the maximum number of LEDs light up at the same time is actually eight. The LEDs are arranged as 8×8 set of rows and columns.

The connections are as follow:
VCC→5V
GND→GND
DIN→11
CS →10
CLK→13

LIBRARY CONFIG AND DOWNLOAD
The Parola library as a dependency and requires additional library MAX72xx Arduino library This library has support for many different types of models of LED Matrix.

https://github.com/MajicDesigns/MD_MAX72XX

https://github.com/MajicDesigns/MD_Parola

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

So you need to edit the library file to set the right setting to select the Led Matrix you are using.
For more information on what file to edit in the library have a look at the tutorial video.

TUTORIAL VIDEO