For those who might be interest in the art creative part of this project, designing the smiley pixel faces, below is the process is fun process I went through.

I have had to use an open-source platform PixelArt to design the Art animation for the Droid. The process was quite straight forward once I knew the type of animation I wanted on the Droid. The platform has tutorials on how to achieve desired design effect. For this process, I would recommend sketching ideas on paper first to help understand how to bring them onto pixel art. I did struggle as I had some restraints with the pixel canvas size which was 18x10, making it difficult to get proportional designs on the droid. However, I was able to make about 18-pixel designs for the droid and the fun part is you can do this also by yourself following the steps taken.

Going for a smaller pixel pitch size is something I would consider doing moving forward, to allow freedom of manipulating pictures into pixel canvas easily.

An example below is of an angry face pixel design that will appear and reflect upon a high polluted room or environment.

Once a design has been made, the next phase is to convert this into the droid. This is done using Led Matrix Control software (LMCS) by YouTuber Tyler Jones. This is used for controlling LED matrix in real-time.

The LED control software helps to convert the pixel-designed files, this means I can save the design to “.txt” format that will be readable by the Droid when uploaded onto Arduino. Another cool feature with LMCS is that you can upload actual images and convert them directly into pixel art in real-time with little or no iterations.

The link above on his name, directs you to his youtube video tutorials on how to achieve desirable pixel art design and animations of your choice.

I have also attached all the pixel art designs I made for the droid on files attachment section.