Driving an 8x8 Led Matrix using the Adafruit HT16K33 Led Matrix Driver backpack with Arduino

When Nwazet closed down I bought a number of 8x8 Led Matrices for $1 each. I had these for a while and then bought some Adafruit 16x8 Led Matrix Driver Backpacks - HT16K33 to power the Matrices.

This seemed like an awesome plan, but this backpack was my first lesson in making sure that the products I was using are popular and well supported. While there are tons of examples of how to wire the adafruit backpacks with the same chip that are integrated, I could not find anything using my backpacks.

Eventually I found a datasheet for my matrix and used a piece of paper to map out the pins from the matrix and where they needed to connect to on the backpack

Then I laid out the breakout and a matrix on some breadboards and started wiring it all together.

I cobbled together some code from a few different examples and finally got the matrix working. The code is on github and there is a video of the matrix in action below.