If you've ever done any live video streaming before, you may have heard of the Stream Deck. It allows you to customize the live streaming experience for your viewers such as showing the number of viewers, running custom keyboard commands, or showing animations. It allows you to customize the buttons too with whatever graphics you want.

But did you know there's other non-streaming uses for the Stream Deck such as controlling lights in a house, open applications, or open web pages in a browser window? You can even write custom plugins to extend the capabilities.

This project uses a custom Stream Deck plugin to communicate directly with the Adafruit IO REST API. It works by posting a specific value to a feed and each button will post a different value to the feed allowing you to easily change messages.

The message panel itself is driven by the Metro M4 Express Airlift Lite. It will connect to local WiFi and read the value of the message straight from your feed. It even allows some basic formatting such as color and text size. The feed values are limited to 50 characters, so the more formatting you apply, the less text you can show. Fortunately, the message panel can hold a maximum of 40 characters.

Parts

On top of the Metro M4 Express Airlift is an Adafruit RGB Matrix Shield.

For this project, the 64x32 RGB Matrix was used and it is available in 4 different pitches. The smaller the pitch is, the smaller the LEDs are, but also the closer together they are.

You will also need a 5V power adapter that can drive a lot of current. We stock a nice 4 Amp model which was used for this project.

If you plan on 3D printing the Backing, you will also need these Heat-set Inserts.

You also may want this tool for the heat-set inserts.

M3x8mm should also work fine if that's what you have available.

The only other hardware you will need are some nice long wood screws (about 1.5" or longer) for mounting in the wall. It is very important that these are steel screws because the magnetic screws will need to stick to them.