Adafruit has been selling the original SmartMatrix Shield for over a year, and now they are stocking our newest shield: SmartMatrix SD Shield (V3).
Images courtesy Adafruit
If you’ve never heard of the SmartMatrix SD Shield, it’s a redesigned SmartMatrix Shield with a microSD card on board to make playing Animated GIFs on SmartMatrix easier, and a lower profile design. It has a few more improvements as well:
- 5V level shifters for better compatibility with 5V panels
- Expansion port for pins on end of Teensy: A14/DAC, PGM, VBAT
- Improved expansion port pinout, breaking pins out in logical groups
- Larger female panel connector to avoid off-by-one alignment
- Improved silkscreen labels, now visible when using right-angle
connectors - Replaced shrouded male header with plain double-row male header to
make room for larger expansion port
If you purchased a SmartMatrix SD Shield from us previously through our Tindie store, at Maker Faire, or through Hackaday, the only significant change on the V3 revision is the level shifting buffers. We found a few panels at Adafruit - in particular the 32x64 panels which may come from a different vendor - weren’t compatible with the 3.3V signals output by the Teensy. The buffers bring the signals closer to 5V.