Adafruit's PioMatter library adds HUB75 RGB LED Matrix support to the Raspberry Pi 5

The Raspberry Pi 5 brought a more powerful CPU and GPU and faster I/Os compared to the Raspberry Pi 4, as well as some incompatibilities. While the transition from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Raspberry Pi 5 is usually painless for most applications, Adafruit notes that the ability to drive HUB75 RGB LED matrices was lost on the Raspberry Pi 5 which now relies on the Raspberry Pi RP1 peripheral control to drive GPIOs instead of the Broadcom processor directly controlling them.

The company has now addressed that by using the PIO (Programmable I/O) block in the RP1 chip, yes that’s the same PIOs as found in the RP2040 or RP2350 microcontroller, to drive HUB75 RGB LED matrices from the Raspberry Pi 5, and their work can be found on the Adafruit-Blinka-Raspberry-Pi5-Piomatter repository on GitHub.

HUB75 RGB Matrix Raspberry Pi 5 — Adafruit’s RGB Matrix Bonnet on Raspberry Pi 5 SBC

The instructions to install the Adafruit Blinka Raspberry Pi 5 PioMatter library (or just PioMatter for short) can be found on Adafruit Learn. Once you have installed the RGB Matrix Bonnet or RGB Matrix HAT to the Raspberry Pi 5, and connected a HUB75 RGB matrix, you can install the library as follows on Raspberry Pi OS:

python -m venv ~/venvs/blinka_venv
source ~/venvs/blinka_venv/bin/activate
pip install adafruit-blinka
pip install pillow
pip install numpy
pip install Adafruit-Blinka-Raspberry-Pi5-Piomatter

python -m venv ~/venvs/blinka_venv

source ~/venvs/blinka_venv/bin/activate

pip install adafruit-blinka

pip install pillow

pip install numpy

pip install Adafruit-Blinka-Raspberry-Pi5-Piomatter

You’ll also need to add the PIO subsystem rule configuration by editing /etc/udev/rules.d/99-com.rules:

SUBSYSTEM=="*-pio", GROUP="gpio", MODE="0660"

1	SUBSYSTEM=="*-pio", GROUP="gpio", MODE="0660"

After a reboot, you should be OK to run some commands from the terminal to drive your HUB75 RGB matrix. For example, the script below will draw a square, a circle, and a triangle:

python single_panel_simpletest.py

1	python single_panel_simpletest.py

Big Buck Bunny video HUB75 RGB matrix — Big Buck Bunny MP4 video played on Raspberry Pi 5 connected to HUB75 display

Adafruit Learn has more examples explaining how to play a GIF, run scrolling text, mirror the serial console, and even play MP4 videos like Big Buck Bunny as shown in the video below.

The PioMatter library is still at the Alpha stage so there may be some bugs here and there. You don’t necessarily need a Linux-capable SBC to drive HUB75 RGB matrices, and Debashis just wrote about the Pimoroni Interstate 75 W (RP2350) board designed for HUB75 LED matrix panels. Playing MP4 videos will be tricker on a Raspberry Pi RP2350 board, although not impossible…

Via Hackster.io

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.