How to control an LED name badge with scrolling text?

Other Hardware LEDs and Multiplexing
1

Help! I'm looking for a way to control a small LED name badge with Arduino.

The goal is to display 3 single words on 3 separate LED badges, each about 6" wide by 1" high. We are hoping for 10 characters per badge, about 8 x 12 pixels.

Here is an LED Scrolling Message Badge that is pretty close to what we are looking for. I purchased it from Centrix here:
http://www.centrix-intl.com/details.asp?productid=9776

It looks great, but I do not know how to control it from Arduino. You can control it from a PC via USB, using their Windows software called Badge. But I cannot find much documentation for that LED badge or the software.

Anybody have any ideas on these questions:

  1. Is there an Arduino sketch or library that I could use to control that LED?
  2. If not, is there a comparable LED badge or matrix that can already be controlled with Arduino?
    (it must fit in a small footprint, 4 to 6" wide, with 6-10 characters at a time, 8x12 pixels per character)

We are creating an interactive art piece called the Pataphysical Slot Machine, which lets you get instructions from the future, at the touch of a button. You can see the art in progress and read more about it here:

[Album] Pataphysics 2020-2021

Any help would be much appreciated. I'm kinda stuck right now :frowning:

2

Fabrice,
I found this post after I read your comment on my blog.
The small LED display you bought is not intended to be interfaced with an Arduino. This would not be an easy task anyway, since the only available connector is USB.
There is another display, 6" x 1.5", single color, 32x8 LEDs, that can be controlled by an Arduino. I used it in my BookClock project here:

Are you looking to make it into a portable device?