I’ve been wanting to make a 1:220 scale megacity diorama and don’t know what options I have. I’m projecting I’ll need to control the speed of two motors, some LEDs, and maybe a dozen or so tiny screens as digital billboards. It’s the screens I’m worried most about.
I’d like to scavenge digital displays from e-waste, group them by type/resolution, and have a slideshow for each group that rotates throughout the city.
My initial idea was to use digital photo frames, but they’re too big, and used ones are still too expensive for the quantity I need.
I’m assuming I will need multiple controllers(/processors?), but I don’t know enough terminology to find what I need. I’m still thinking out the diorama, so if it’s too hard/expensive I can just do backlit decals, but that’s boring.
Personally I’m a big fan of Adafruits ItsyBitsy 32u4. Loads of potential in a small and cheap backage. Enumerates as an arduino via the USB port, so no special hardware is requires to program it. I use one to read a PWM signal and measure the pulse width on a few channel, so I would think it’s capable of outputting similar signals, which comes in handy for contrilling LEDs and small steppers.
If you want to control something a bit more power hungry via PWM you might want to look into PCA9685 which works really well with, for example, a raspberry pi zero.