The 4×4 LED Display was my first project with a two-layer circuitboard layout. The alignment was not 100% optimal, but sufficent. I wanted to make the board as small as possible, so the parts had to be stacked at some places. The square LED’s were painted black on the sides to keep the pixels sharp.
The rows and columns are both controlled by a 4094 Shift&Store-register. The upper four bits control the coloumns and the lower four the rows. So for each frame 4 bytes have to be shifted in. That is done via a QBasic programm that toggles pins on the serialport. Instead it would also be possible to just send the bytes over a serialconnection, but I was to lazy to write code for that.
To generate the patterns, one can put them together binary by hand. But I choose the easy way again and wrote a Delphi-Program to generate patternfiles, which then would be send to the display by a QBasic programm. (I test all my circuits on old DOS-PCs).