Vinyltron — Album Art on 4,096 LEDs

The display

4,096 individually addressable LEDs.

A 64×64 HUB75 RGB LED matrix is a grid of 4,096 LEDs — each one driven independently, each capable of displaying any of 16.7 million colors at full PWM brightness control. The same HUB75 protocol drives LED walls at concerts and sports arenas, scaled down to a 7.5-inch panel that sits on a shelf or tucks inside a cabinet. At a few meters, the pixel grid blends into a continuous image.

4,096

Individually addressable LEDs

64 columns × 64 rows

16.7M

Colors per pixel

Full 24-bit RGB via PWM

7.5″

Square panel

192 × 192 mm · P3 pitch

HUB75

Industry-standard protocol

The same interface as stadium LED walls

Dark Side of the Moon filling the LED matrix, DSD64 format badge in the upper left

Live playback

Your music.
On the wall.
In real time.

Vinyltron follows Volumio's pushState event stream — no polling loop. Track changes appear on the next render cycle. When playback stops, it transitions to whatever idle mode you've chosen.

Album art resized and cropped to fill the 64×64 display
Optional progress bar with configurable height and RGB color
Format badge: DSD64, DSD128, 24/96, 16/44.1, MP3, AAC, FLAC, and more
Handles pause, stop, track change, and reconnect — no stale art flashing
Starts automatically on boot — no manual restart needed

Idle modes

Always something
worth looking at.

When music stops, the display doesn't go dark. Choose from your own photos, five generative screensaver engines, or a live pixel-art weather readout — all configurable from the Volumio plugin settings page. Screenshots labeled (sim) are rendered from the matrix simulator at 8× scale.

Album art

Weather · day (sim)

Weather · night

Brian's Brain (sim)

Gray-Scott (sim)

Live weather

Current conditions.
Pixel-perfect.

Live temperature, condition icon, high/low, humidity, wind, and moon phase — fetched from Open-Meteo (free, no API key required) and rendered entirely on the matrix in 64×64 pixels. AQI pulls from the air quality feed and color-codes by EPA tier. No cloud account, no subscription.

Automatic day/night switching with moon phase rendering
Secondary metric: humidity, wind speed, or AQI glyph
Configurable location, units, refresh interval, and fps
Falls back to mock data if coordinates aren't configured yet

Weather display on hardware showing moon phase, 55°, wind and sunrise time

Screensavers

Generative art.
Running on a Pi 3B.

Five simulation engines run directly on the Raspberry Pi, each producing patterns that evolve continuously. Each has configurable palette, speed, and reset interval from the Volumio UI — with advanced tuning parameters in config.toml.

Brian's Brain — three-state cellular automaton with selectable palette
Langton's Ant — multi-ant emergent highway patterns
Chaos Game — slowly rotating Sierpiński fractal
Gray-Scott — reaction-diffusion coral, spot, and worm morphologies
Lissajous — orbit-trail figure with slow phase drift

Gray-Scott reaction diffusion — blue and red organic shapes

Photo manager

Your photos.
No SSH required.

A built-in browser UI at volumio.local:3018/photos lets you upload idle photos from any device on your home network — phone, tablet, or laptop. Set a single photo, pick from a folder, or randomize — all without touching the Pi. No authentication; intended for a trusted home network, the same trust model as the Volumio web UI.

Upload, select, delete, and randomize from phone or laptop
Accepts HEIC, JPEG, and PNG
Optional daily display schedule for photo-frame mode
Configurable port if 3018 conflicts with another service

Vinyltron showing album art with a progress bar, Pioneer receiver and decanter visible on the shelf

Why Vinyltron

Album art display, open-source.
No subscription. No cloud.

Commercial LED music displays exist. They ship in a nice box and look great on a shelf. Vinyltron lives inside your existing rack, costs a fraction of the price, and does things these displays don't.

Feature	Commercial display	Vinyltron
Cost	$199–$219	~$60–80 in parts*
Live album art	✓	✓
Subscription required	Varies	None. Ever.
Live weather display	—	✓ Temperature, AQI, moon phase
Generative screensavers	—	✓ 5 simulation engines
Audiophile format badge	—	✓ DSD64, 24/96, FLAC, and more
Volumio integration	Varies	pushState events, no polling
Open source	—	✓ MIT license, full source on GitHub
You built it	—	✓ Priceless

Hardware

One Pi.
One panel.
One Bonnet.

One Pi, one panel, one Bonnet. The Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet handles level shifting and hardware PWM timing for cleaner, more stable output than direct GPIO. A separate 5V supply keeps the Pi stable under full matrix load. Fits neatly inside an AV cabinet or on a shelf.

No dedicated software account or cloud service required
The Bonnet isn't required — direct GPIO wiring works too, with a retro-flicker charm
Pi 5 in software-pulse mode (panel rendering untested); Pi 3B for hardware PWM
Full hardware setup, BOM, and wiring guide in docs/hardware.md

Part	Tested setup
Host	Raspberry Pi 3B · Volumio 4 · Debian Bookworm
Matrix	64×64 P3 HUB75E RGB LED panel
Interface	Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet `#3211`
Matrix power	Dedicated 5V 4A supply
Wiring	GPIO4 → GPIO18 jumper for hardware PWM

Install

Install.
Reboot.
Configure.

Vinyltron is in the Volumio plugin store (beta channel). Find it under Plugins → User Interface and install. The installer configures boot files to free GPIO18/PWM for the matrix — this intentionally disables onboard/HDMI audio, which claims that GPIO pin. Reboot when prompted, then set the panel mapping and idle mode in plugin settings.

Full walkthrough in the install guide. Bonnet wiring and power in hardware setup.

Read install guide →

# In Volumio web UI:
# Plugins → User Interface → search Vinyltron → Install

# reboot when prompted (configures PWM boot settings)
$ sudo reboot

# configure in Volumio → Plugins → Vinyltron
      

Album art.On 4,096 LEDs.For the costof the parts.

4,096 individually addressable LEDs.

Your music.On the wall.In real time.

Always somethingworth looking at.

Current conditions.Pixel-perfect.

Generative art.Running on a Pi 3B.

Your photos.No SSH required.

Album art display, open-source.No subscription. No cloud.

One Pi.One panel.One Bonnet.

Install.Reboot.Configure.

Album art.
On 4,096 LEDs.
For the cost
of the parts.