This IoT project pairs an ESP8266 microcontroller with a P4 LED matrix to make a real-time COVID-19 case tracker for India. The system fetches live data from worldometers.info over Wi-Fi and displays the statistics on a 64x32 pixel LED matrix.

Technical implementation

The code uses the PxMatrix library to drive the display, with configuration for both ESP32 and ESP8266 and separate pin definitions for each.

ESP8266 pin configuration:

• Latch (LAT): pin 16
• Address A: pin 5
• Address B: pin 4
• Address C: pin 15
• Address D: pin 12
• Address E: pin 0
• Output Enable (OE): pin 2

Features

The display supports multiple colours, including red, green, blue, white, yellow, cyan, magenta, and lime. I configured a 64x32 matrix with adjustable refresh timing and a scrolling-text function for showing information. The code exposes three data endpoints, tracking confirmed cases, deaths, and recovered patients in India through the API.

Display

The setup initializes the text rendering with “India” and “Covid19 Tracker” messages. A scroll_text() function scrolls text horizontally across the matrix with customizable colours and speeds, so the live figures move smoothly across the panel.

Originally published on sslabs.in.