I wrote this after buying the Pi-Lite in Maplin

Since the original manufacture has closed it's webpage this intended to be a guide based on various sources (waybackmachine) and the internet.

The Pi-Lite is 9x14 (126) LED matrix display with an on-board Arduino ATmega 328 processor. Each pixel is individually addressable, so you can display anything in the grid. The Pi-Lite is a fully assembled board. It was primarilly designed as a Raspberry Pi add-on board, but works equally well without the Raspberry Pi.

The idea for the board came from the very popular Arduino LoL shield by Jimmy Rodgers and brings the capabilities of such a shield to the world of the Raspberry Pi. LoL stands for “Lots of LEDs".

The Pi-Lite PCB is shown below

You drive the Pi-Lite via its serial port:

1. it is really simple to send text and graphics to the 126 LEDs from anything that addresses the serial port, such a program, or a serial monitor .
2. you can program the on-board Arduino processor with your own program, replacing the pre-loaded Ciseco software You can access the serial port in several different ways:
3. By plugging the Pi-Lite into the GPIO pins of your Raspberry Pi you access it via the Raspberry Pis serial comms port at 9600bps.
4. By using the serial port brought out on the FTDI connector, you can use other devices than the Raspberry Pi, such as a PC, a Mac or Linux machine. The LED matrix is controlled by an ATmega 328 processor, which is pre-loaded with Ciseco software. This pre-loaded software is based on, and improves, the original Jimmy Rogersversion. The Pi-Lite will run any Jimmy Rogers or similar sketch. It will also run your own sketch if you want to write one.

With a suitable stand-alone programme, the Pi-Lite can run on its own, without a connection to a serial port. For instance, you can run your display or scrolling message on battery or mains.