Timesquare watch LED matrix for dev/upgrade?

[mwm]

While looking for arduino-based hardware to move my LED watch prototype to, I stumbled on the times square watch. Not merely perfect, but better than anything expected to find!
Already on order.

However, I have two questions:

Can any of the LCD matrix parts you sell reasonably be used in place of the one in the kit? In particular, the bicolor one would allow me to build the watch whose prototype is running on my desk now. I don't expect that to work, but it would be great if it did.

Second, is there some way to develop faces on an arduino other than the watch? Running the Watch library (possibly hacked) on a Uno with a compatible (which means?) LCD and RTC?

Thanks,
<mike

[pburgess]

Hi Mike,

The bicolor matrix isn't an option, unfortunately...we're using every last pin on the microcontroller to drive the matrix directly, not with a driver as on our matrix backpacks.

As for developing elsewhere: the code on the watch is using the Adafruit_GFX library, so you could (in theory) work on some code using any of our displays. But there are some functions in the watch code (such as the grayscale blit) that are specific to the matrix driver. So as long as you're using normal drawing functions (lines, text, etc.), no problem, but the slick antialiased stuff wouldn't work elsewhere.

[mwm]

Better than I expected, but not as good as I hoped.

Thanks. Now I just have to be patient until it arrives.

[mwm]

For what it's worth, using the bicolor matrix for development worked fairly well. I had to change the code to deal with dynamically generated on/off values instead of color constants, but that was pretty mechanical.

The nasty part was figuring out why the cylon seconds ticker - which uses millis() as a timer - didn't work on the watch.