I think I've found a way to do that with a single LoLShield, and it's embarrassingly simple to do. My goal is to display an image on the LoLShield of an arbitrary size, without compromising quality or readability.

The display shows only a small piece of the image at a time, but moves the image around, to let the viewer mentally assemble the image.

There are 2 parts to the code - a Processing app which encodes the image for the Arduino, and the Arduino app itself which renders the image on the LoLShield. The image is currently hard-coded, but a future version will allow the image to be loaded over a serial port.

For the following files, remove the "_.txt" extension to use the files with Arduino & Processing.

Arduino code: https://kwartzlab.ca/sites/default/files/LOL_Image_Kwartzlab.pde_.txt

Processing code: https://kwartzlab.ca/sites/default/files/ImageBitmapperForLOLShield_Kwartzlab.pde_.txt

Logo: Things I've learned: - It took about 10 hours to write what was ultimately about 50 lines of code. Ugh. Welcome to software development. - I can`t just assume there'll be a steady stream of data from the computer when sending the image. I need to rethink how I'll read the image in, which'll be a future update. - Running out of memory is a pain in the butt, especially when the space available is so small - I can't even use 350 bytes in standard memory space, or the program will act totally unpredictably.

To do: - Be able to send image run-length data across the serial line, and dynamically. - Optimize the device code. Right now rendering the top-left is much quicker than the bottom-right, on the order of milliseconds (which is a lot) - Implement grayscale. I'm thinking of adding 1/3 white, 2/3 white for a total of 4 states. I'll have to identify each run-length, as I can't assume it to be any other colour. To get these effects, I'll have to flicker the LEDs the appropriate level.