There's not a lot of soldering needed, especially if you go the route of repurposing existing hardware like an Ulanzi. It's mostly about making the right data connections and providing the right power.
I appreciate your response. I wish there were guides for software developers like me that are also hardware noobs - ESPHome looks very powerful but I don't want to write yaml; I would rather write code for hardware that is easy to assemble and has an sdk. I feel like that will be more fun for me to setup.
* The display component that handles drawing into a grid of pixels (https://esphome.io/components/display/)
* The text renderer
* addressable_light platform (https://esphome.io/components/display/addressable_light) to create a display matrix on top of an addressable LED driver (https://esphome.io/components/light/neopixelbus)
* An inexpensive 8x32 LED panel (https://www.google.com/search?q=8x32+ws2812b)
* You can make multiples of these, or chain the panels together, for more space
Of course, rather than reinventing any wheels, you can follow guides like https://community.home-assistant.io/t/led-matrix-with-esphom...
There's not a lot of soldering needed, especially if you go the route of repurposing existing hardware like an Ulanzi. It's mostly about making the right data connections and providing the right power.