# FPGA RGB Matrix

## Overview

![](https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/assets/assets/000/000/904/medium800/led_matrix_fpgamatrix.jpg?1396766778)

## Controlling the Adafruit 32x16 RGB LED Matrix with a DE0-Nano FPGA Board
Adafruit currently sells a really cool [16x32 RGB LED matrix panel](http://www.adafruit.com/products/420) in their store that is "designed to be driven by an FPGA or other high speed processor." The purpose of this tutorial is to help you get started driving a small handful of these displays with the [DE0-Nano board](http://www.adafruit.com/category/products/451), which contains a mid-range Altera FPGA.

## Prerequisites
 

This tutorial is for those who are familiar with electronics, microcontrollers, programming IDEs and noodling around on a windows computer with drivers, command prompts, editing text files, etc. Its a good introductory FPGA project but not a good introductory microcontroller/electronics project. 

You need to have the Quartus II software installed on your computer. If not, you can download it from [Altera's website](http://www.altera.com/) or install it from the DVD that comes with the DE0-Nano board. You will also need to install the USB-Blaster drivers that enable your computer to communicate with the FPGA (see this short [YouTube video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cezEo9itJBM&t=10s)).

[This tutorial was written by Brian Nez!](http://nezzen.net/)

- [Next Page](https://learn.adafruit.com/fpga-rgb-matrix/new-project.md)

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