Control RGB LEDs with Arduino || Arduino Essentials #1 

Hey, you seem to know a lot about these channels. Can you recommend me some? Thanks

Natural Nerd What about a 100W LED with an Arduino based pwm fan controller and a temp sensor?

I would like seeing you doing more of the coding stuff. love your videos, they are greatly made! if you only could talk a little bit slower. not always easy to understand what you are saying wth your nowegian accent.

I have an idea. how about an led strip behind the dashboard of a car or inside of it that lights up and does a forward and back motion and then stays on when you switch on the ignition of the car. i have been looking for a video on this and cant find it anywhere. thats actually how i found this video. keep up the great work.

Want to see a video of arduino nano bluetooth servo powered speed controlled tank

I gave 4 pin RGB led strip. How to wire it

Comments like these is what keeps us going :)

Jesus Christ is God

Thanks man :)

Did you ever find a good one? I'm wanting to start a project that needs exactly that.

@@sefan1317 same! Trying to make an LED wall

hahah I'm trying to do that too

@@joshjohnson2460 did u ever find a vid

@@sefan1317 did u ever find a vid

I have the same issue.

I had the same issue but then realized where I had “CRGB led[NUM_LEDS];” I had parenthesis around NUM_LEDS instead of the brackets

Glad to hear that, then the video was worthwhile making :)

:)

There is no limit to LED theoretically. I think the major issue with so many leds will become power consumption, as most of them run on 10/5V only. I have a strip of 120 LEDs and it draws approximately 36W on 5 V, so you get 7A current. On 1000 that would be 70A. Very high draw from home sockets is I believe somewhere between 15-20A.

I was mainly concerned about address-ability. Being able to individually address each LED, and what signal wire protocol. i.e. if using 2-wire serial communication how fast is the refresh rate to loop through each LED and set it's light value. If using a hybrid parallel/serial signal wire protocol with something like ethernet wire then what kind of refresh rate could be expected. If using a fully parallel wire obviously addressing loop time would be very fast.

My other main concern is how would the setup/configuration be done for very large numbers of LED's before it becomes impractical for individual addressing. i.e. How do you do this kind of multiplexing? I've seen a lot of videos that say you just do it, but gloss over the implementation details. I like that you have all the details in this video and would like to see something that goes into greater detail on large scale multiplexing.

If you do it through arduino, you don't care about the serial connection. You upload the script and it just runs on its cpu - aroudn 800MHz. through serial/tcp, you can only upload some simple commands that affect the loop, where you don't care about speed. the limiting factor in this case would be both the arduino and the led itself. I really have no idea. I recommend github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/Overview to browse through their library. It's amazing and I used it for all my projects so far.

Ahhh ok I just looked up the specs for the Atmega chip at 250,000 bps, and 16 bit serial address gives about 65,000 individual light addresses as the limit. But lets say a liberal estimate of 10,000 individually addressable lights on a serial signal wire. So that means to drive that chain we would have to send 160,000 bits which would take approximately 0.64 seconds, which is about 1.5625 hz refresh for the entire light chain as the theoretical limit. So my real interest is in how you could get this refresh rate up by using more than just 1 serial wire, and what would work best and how the implementation would work. Obviously if you use a 2-wire telephone wire you could probably get this to double since the data pipe would double. 250,000 bps down 2-wires rather than just 1. 4-wire security cable would double it again to update the chain in 0.08 seconds 12.5 hz. Ethernet wire would double it again and give you about 25 hz. I suppose that is acceptable refresh rate for most applications. And most applications will have less then 10,000 individual lights. ;-) Next interesting challenge is as you said, power, and of course programming. I'll have some fun when I finish building my Maker Lab space. Thank you for all of this! Good stuff!!

i use a 3.7v 6600mah lipo with a powerboost 1000c (5v 1a) i also use a cheap dollar store power bank for $3 its 5v 1a 4400mah.

There are 'open frame' SMPS at 5V that can handle up to 30A

@warriorpluto These LEDs are USUALLY for 5V ONLY

Yes..!! All microcontrollers have this function inbuilt..!! So, if you program/flash the code once ... Your Arduino board will always have the same code stored in its internal Read Only Memory. Just give the power to your Arduino Nano...and it will do the same job.... whenever you power it up. Hope I answered your question..??😊

Thanks for the feedback. We actually address them individually, even though the effect is not so visible. When looping through the led array, each element led[i] can be given a different CRGB value, resulting in each led having different colors. Deciding how we want to give the leds different colours is more of a design issue when creating a project :)

if you look at how for loops work, do you see when you set led[i] to a color? you're actually setting the led of index "i" to that color try it again and type in a number without writing the for loop, and you'll just change that led

Same problem here.

The red and white wire not on the connector ia just for easy access im pretty sure

I have the same kind of wiring, did you ever figure this out?

I creatd a corsair node pro using an arduino pro mirco.

Possible so long as the voltage is high enough. From the code 2:29, leds[i] = Function(X, Y, Z) where i is the position of LED in the strip.

Thank you !

only with a couple of LEDs, the Arduino does not output enough current to power many LEDs

Natural Nerd My first project is going to be small. Would 3-4 be safe for testing? Am I correct in thinking that LEDs just glow dimmer when under-powered? I don't want to "magic smoke" the board right off the bat.

I'm pretty sure 3-4 would be fine for testing. If you draw too much current, you can damage the board, yes.

Natural Nerd Sorry, I'm new to Arduino boards. Do you know if it is a regulated 5V output or just a contact point to the circuit board's internal power?

Look at the answer in this stackexchange, I think it answers your question: electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/67092/how-much-current-can-i-draw-from-the-arduinos-pins

not quite, if i read the code correctly, the individual LEDs are stored in an array, which starts at 0. That's why in the function where he made them all turn blue for the first time, the loop counter "i" started at 0. so you would have to do led[0] = crgb(255, 0, 0); led[1] = crgb(0, 255, 0); led[2] = crgb(0, 0, 255); fastLED.show();

yeah i figured it out after many failed attempts..

That should work, blue is 0,0,255, but for instance purple would be 255,0,255 or something like that.

Same issue. Did you get it fixed?

@@PlasmaSabre sir dose not led it is leds all change name in skech

For instance if your using it as the means to totally control reverse lights/ brake lights/ turn signals using addressable LEDs