JEG2

JEG2

Author of Designing Elixir Systems with OTP

My wife use to have a Pixoo64. She loved choosing what to display, but found the app pretty frustrating. The hardware also gave out sooner than I would have expected.

I’m considering replacing it with a Nerves based solution and I would just love any guidance you can share for this pretty low-experience hardware guy.

It looks like I could use something like this display connected to a Pi 4 with this bonnet. My initial questions are:

  • Do you see any problems with this hardware?
  • How will I communicate with the screen from my app? circuits_gpio?
  • Will the Pi have enough speed to keep refreshing that display and serve an API, LiveView, or Livebook to provide an interface?

Thanks again for your time!

Showing Posts 1 to 1

lawik

lawik

Nerves Core Team

Very cool!

I think the hat will essentially handle the hard parts of driving the display. I would be surprised if the Pi4 would work very hard. You talk to hat, hat talks to LED matrix.

This is the Python driver: GitHub - hzeller/rpi-rgb-led-matrix: Controlling up to three chains of 64x64, 32x32, 16x32 or similar RGB LED displays using Raspberry Pi GPIO · GitHub

You can either port that to Elixir or ensure you can run it on Nerves and talk to it from Elixir. You could go wild and try cocoa’s pythonx library to avoid needing to poke around with Python support on the Nerves system (semi-advanced), we do not include Python by default. Porting to Elixir is the boss move but more time-consuming so depends on what you want to do.

If porting, yes. Probably circuits GPIO, I didn’t dig in to check if the driver uses more common protocols (I2C, SPI, etc).

— All posts loaded —

Where Next? Top

Trending in Questions Top

katta
I having some trouble figuring out if I have set myself too strict of standards for my production server. Currently I can handle 75% of r...
New
brecabral
Documentation While reading the Scoped Routes section, I noticed that the documentation currently refers to a problem without explainin...
New
achenet
Hello, I’m trying to build a basic Phoenix web-app, and I’d like to use Tailwind. However, when I launch mix phx.server, I get an error...
New
kpanic
Hi everyone, I am toying with the idea of building a “match maker” for giving personal help to people that wants to start coding. I sta...
New
asweet-confluent
I recently noticed that Elixir’s Logger defaults its primary log level to :debug when no :logger, :level application configuration is pre...
New
Cxx-mlr
I’m working on a small exercise involving update_in/3, and I came up with this solution: data = %{ name: "Periodic Table", category:...
New
ChrisAmelia
I’ve got trouble wrapping my head around the order in which functions are called in this snippet (from Phoenix’s authentication): toke...
New

Other Trending Topics Top

GenericJam
Edit: 2026 May 15 - This post is archived. Mob is alive!! Main docs: mob v0.7.11 — Documentation A bit of explanation for the slightly c...
New
JesseHerrick
Hey, I’m Jesse and I’m the main contributor behind Dexter, a full-featured, lightning-fast Elixir LSP optimized for large codebases. It s...
New
mudasobwa
I am happy to introduce the very α version of the new programming language compiled to BEAM. Welcome Cure. It has literally three kille...
New
garrison
Hobbes is a low-level distributed database for the Elixir programming language. Hobbes provides a simple, safe, and scalable storage lay...
New
mhanberg
Hi everyone! The first release candidate for the Expert language server project is now available! We’ve published a press release detai...
New
budgie
A little off-topic, but I feel like people here have a good head on their shoulders. I used to be quite good at making software. Was luc...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement

Options

Thread Display Mode




Thread Preview

Skip Thread Previews