Back in 2017, luxury fashion house Chanel did a "Data Center Collection" runway show featuring a bunch of their classic purse designs with integrated LED displays. I don't think these pieces were ever sold to the general public, but I managed to find a "Lambskin LED Boy 2.0 Clutch" on a fashion resale website sold as non-working. I got the display system back up and running as a Valentine's Day gift for my wife, and I also reverse-engineered the image format used by the firmware and put some of my own animations on there. Although there isn't anything earth-shattering from an electronics perspective inside, I couldn't find anything on the Internet indicating whether anyone else had ever tried to repair or hack one of these, so I'll share some notes of what I've found so far.
While looking at the original Chanel animations, I noticed that an 8x4 block of pixels just above the lower left corner starts to glitch out when large amounts of LEDs are lit up. A couple of other blocks on the bottom also jump the gun on transitioning to black, though at normal speed this isn't noticeable to the naked eye. My limited understanding of how LED panels work makes me think that maybe there's an under-voltage issue; since those pixels work fine during less busy loads, it could be that the panel isn't giving enough voltage to some of the controllers when too many LEDs are lit up at once. The electronics look to be in good condition, so hopefully this is just down to an old battery?
UPDATE: I was right! It turns out the battery doesn't charge unless you use Chanel's own USB-A to USB-C charging cable. Running it off of the USB power eliminates the glitches.
I updated the OP to include these photos inline as well.
