To work with the Protomatter library in the Arduino IDE, access the Library Manager from the Sketch menu…

Sketch→Include Library→Manage Libraries…

Type “protomatter” in the search field at the top-right of the Library Manager window, then click Install for the Adafruit Protomatter library.

The very latest versions of the Arduino IDE automatically install other dependent libraries. If you’re on a slightly earlier version, search for “gfx” and install Adafruit GFX Library manually…

Adafruit_GFX is the same library that drives many of our LCD and OLED displays…if you’ve done other graphics projects, you might already be familiar! And if not, we have a separate guide explaining all of the available drawing functions. Most folks can get a quick start by looking at the Protomatter library’s “simple” and “doublebuffer_scrolltext” examples and tweaking these for their needs.

Some of the Protomatter examples rely on the Adafruit_PixelDust, Adafruit_LIS3DH and/or AnimatedGIF libraries…so again, search for and install those if not already handled automatically by Arduino.

If you’re using an Adafruit MatrixPortal board specifically, the MatrixPortal guide has a whole page for all of the needed libraries.

For Developers

If your plan is to adapt Protomatter to new devices, not just use it with existing boards, you’ll want to remove any Arduino-installed version of the library and download it from Github instead. This way you can submit pull requests for inclusion in future releases of the code.

You’ll find the Protomatter library at https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Protomatter

and the GFX library, if any changes are needed, is at https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library