Inside an SP002E pixel controller (with schematic) 

I like MartyMacGyver's esp32_digital_led library for the ESP32 series of microcontrollers. The library leverages the onboard "RMT" peripheral (designed for sending data streams for infrared remote control). This means the ESP32 can send long streams with strict clock timing with minimal programming effort and CPU overhead.. Also allows creating two or more distinct bitstreams and sending them in sync.

Thanks for the thorough explanation. I've been using the same WS2811 LEDs and controller as part of my Christmas lighting for about 5 year's. The slow changing rainbow effect is also my favourite, which conveniently is the default effect on starting, which is ideal of timer control.

There is an arduino library from Adafruit for these LEDs. I've had a lot of fun creating my own patterns. These LEDs are available in strips, strings and loose LEDs.

the HD107s LEDs uses standard SPI @ 40KHz (as opposed to the custom 800Hz bit-banged protocol of the WS2812b). this means that any half-decent micro with DMA-driven SPI can run a string of them in its sleep. literally.

I have many of the ws2812 style LEDs I put on the nalcony for Xmass. I have a a programme on my laptop that lets me contol every single light. BUT this looks a very handy driver. Nice video 2x👍

3.3V is on the brink of the minimum „high“ voltage for LED data when the LEDs run at 5V, so maybe that’s why they went a tad higher (still within the Vcc limits of the microcontroller).

I built a camping lantern/bluetooth speaker with stereo VU meter visualizers using WS2812 surface mount LED tape, an Arduino nano, and a $20 Costco lantern. It worked amazingly well considering it was the first time I ever tried programming those LEDs. There are libraries available for the Arduino that make the programming a whole lot easier than trying to bit-bang them yourself.

Always great to see new videos from you Clive. Genuinely so too.

The Nuvoton MS51FB9AE might be a good candidate for our mystery microcontroller, as it has the right power and ground pinout, and also happens to be well stocked on LCSC right now. I'm not sure what to make of the rest of the pins though, as the clock and data are connected to UART peripheral RX and TX (not SPI as I would expect), and the 4 pads on the side that look like a programming header instead go to PWM outputs.

I'll have to look into this, I also like the slow chase rainbow effect, I made a string of slow change LEDs I use as a nightlight with what look like a ball of string on each LED a bit smaller than a cricket ball, be cool to have a chase version.

I love these WS2812B. I literally breathe them. 😁

Addressable LEDs are so versatile and you have SO many ways of driving them! Years ago I got a 5m strip of WS2812B RGB LEDs, and pieces from that strip are now running on a "christmas" star that acts as a night light most of the year (driven by an ESP32 running WLED) and in a pretty large 7-segment clock I built/3D-printed myself (driven by a RasPi running custom python code). Nice to see that there are also off-the-shelf solutions for people who don't want to tinker/code much themselves ^^

They're the same as those I sent you over! Don't forget I also sent you their bigger commercial-grade 24V brothers along with a little arduino mcro - am very much looking forward to your teardown / analysis on those :)

I haven’t been doing any electronics lately because of my migraines so this was a nice refresher

I could sit there and stare at that color pattern you picked for a while. It's just fast enough to be interesting, but not so much that I feel like I'm being beaten over the head with flashing lights. 👍

Very nifty little bit of kit there! Didn't realise such tech existed, so yet another "led collection" for me to buy! The effects look pretty amazing too, with lots of potential applications around the home.

Very attractive and nice effects.

i have used this controller to run lights on a RC Plane for night flying. worked really well.

Interesting, although very limited in terms of control over the LED string. I've got a number of ESP8266's running free WLED firmware pulling controller duty. £1.50 for a controller with artNET/DMX over WiFi isn't bad.

The 100ohms are also their to dampen the ring of the sharp 1MHz signals.

The reason for the discrete voltage regulator is due to the wide range of the operating voltage, 5V-24V. The little uController cannot tolerate a high voltage, probably good up to only 6V. Many manufacturers make LDOs (low drop out regulators) that can produce a tight 3.3V from 5V, but they are only good for a 7V maximum input voltage. Hence these guys decided to "roll their own LDO" using a zener and an NPN, which can easily tolerate 30V or move.

Actually they just require consistent data throughput at X bits per second. A DMA controller can do it as a repeating side process. Then the MCU can spend all it's time updating the values sent.

The 100R in series of the dataline, is a recommendation to put a low value resistor in series with the first led data line.

A very good Friday morning to you all from Wellington Somerset

I've used an Arduino Nano to control those neopixel lights, using an appropriate library file. It works well, although it gets a little complicated when you have an 8x32 pixel panel and you want to put up words but the pixel connections are in a zig-zag back and forth across the panel from one long edge to the next.

I've been using ws2811/12 LEDs since 2014 I got into it for a charity Xmas display and then shop window displays this was before the days of esp8266/32, The 100 ohm resistor will help protect the microcontroller but are more about stopping signal ringing...if you're installing the microcontroller a long way from the LEDs the 100ohm resistor is a must have for stability, I often have 5-10 meters before the first led... nowadays most home users just use wled from aircookie and add custom user mods if necessary.

Thanks for the look at it. Good luck. 👍

Looks like a good project in the making

Thank you BigClive to bring Christmas in August 😘😘😘

I soldered up 100 clear RGB LEDs to some small WS2811 PCB boards obtained from Ebay and wired them up to create some unique Xmas tree lights, I think the small PCB boards I purchased are the same ones used in these strings. They run from an Arduino using the FastLED library and cycle through various routines I've added or tweaked. I wanted to use clear RGB LEDs to try and simulate old fashioned glass fairy lights, rather than go for the pre-built ones that Clive shows here that all seemed to come frosted.

Hey clive! awsome video as always. :) You should check out one of those handheld battery Air Dusters, quite interesting and powerful little packet.

Great job Clive, totally enjoying your videos, keep up the great work mate 🤙🏼🇦🇺

I have a few of those, love them for photography, a powerbank, ws20812B string mounted on something and multiple effects for night photos, would love to see the bluetooth versions taken apart though, guess there is more mysterious chip magic which makes it less interesting i guess

I love these strip's, I run them for my Christmas tree.. use a cheap esp32 to programme them and a mqtt server to get them to sync with my other lights. There is a beautiful comet effect that looks great running um the tree.

Always wondered how they got so much functionality out of such a small device

Spooze !!

Schottky diodes on a diagram look like a Give Way sign trying to do a Bruce Forsythe thing, where with Zeners, they're just waving... :P

there's a few really awesome patterns when hooked to a matrix

Actually, in the video we can see the STM32F0 MCU: it's a typical professional solution for the task of driving addressable LEDs. Using an STM32 MCU, you can get a much more flexible and efficient combination of a timer and DMA to a data stream buffer in RAM. It costs literally zero CPU time to send commands to the LEDs at the highest supported data rate (limited only by timer clock source frequency), resulting in their maximum update rate. It's a very elegant technical solution, I love it.

Best accidental pun @6:07 !! "If they get shorted to 5v, it wouldn't *potentially* be too bad."

I think they went for a custom power supply because some versions of the WS2812 LEDs are only guaranteed to detect a high input level at > 3.5 V, and probably 3.6 V regulators are not as cheap as their solution.

about time you did some videos on ARGB leds. I've creating projects for 10 years now with them

You might want to take a look at WLED software and something like a NodeMCU ESP8266, brilliant bit of kit for driving those pixels. Its what runs my Xmas displays these days.

A light bulb you may want to look at.. I bought some the other day and they run blisteringly hot in a matter of seconds: Linkind B22 Bayonet Cap LED Light Bulb /edit/ I have in fact just burnt my finger taking it out of the fitting

I spooze I'd better get me ass out if me pit and watch this in me telly. Morning Clive ! ☺

at 1:00 what happened to your left hand wrist? 🤔 "I am talking about that wound on left bottle in your left hand!"

High end video as always. May I hope to see the Spark plug tester taken apart and explained?

Oh, I do have one of these laying around...

Something similar in my Bluetooth speaker I think. Same options and a music-beat-flash type setting.

I was looking out for you at The Tattoo, we were on the outskirts. Working in Edinburgh, so we passed by. Fish & Chips for 4 of us was about £60😫😂

Please do a video on Xyloband, the radio controlled LED wrist bands at Coldplay concerts

Another issue with long strings is voltage drop, made worse by the fact that WS2811/WS2812 are 5V devices. Long strings tend to a red hue towards the end.

i recommend the sp107 and the sp108 !

.. Cheers to you. ..

Hi Clive, My guess for the 3.7v is that the WS2812 LEDs usually run on 5v, and they only have a tolerance for data voltages a certain range below that point, and if the micro controller was running at 3v3, that would be too big of a difference for them to be able to see a logic high as such. Just a guess, but 3.7 might just be within the realm of acceptability for the dataline. What do you think?

Spoooooze

Just out of interest Clive, will you be tearing down one of those Eveready remote controlled variable colour LED lamps you get from B&M?

There are ATMegas with pin 7 being supply... but I think they are pin 8 GND rather than pin 9.

Adding variable resistor between clock and neutral make more expansive effect?

try testing *SP107E!!* because it has mic in it, it response the pixels lighting with the sound! it almost has 200 patterns and 50 music patterns... it also connect with your phone using one app called (LED chord) with Bluetooth and "location" in your phone! then you can control the lighting modes! (I have it in my home it's really good!) *"I can send you the video how it's looks working with sound, if you want!"* 😀

ws2813b has a redundancy line, so even if one led in the sequence gets blown, the rest of the line stays alive.

Could you do a video explaining in simple terms how the data transfer works in these and why some lights need it and some don't? Thanks :)

I like to drive addressable RGB LEDs using a raspberry pi, so I can use lots of memory and lots of different algorithms running simultaneously

lol i wanted to just sit here and watch that light

WLED FTW!

Do you happen to know whether I'd be able to replace those buttons with capacitative buttons like the TTP223?

That's two of your videos that have featured a seemingly unnecessary schottky diode now. Something we haven't figured out is going on. Do they come with dodgy power packs that might glitch negative?

Spoo-rwoie!

At first glance, I thought the model# was 'SPOOGE'

My brother has the same controller. Also says the same thing 5v to 24v. However when applying 12v it fried the controller. Not sure why. I looked and ony thing that went bad was the diode and 2 resisters. I repaird them and the controller worked again. The controller fried again and repaired again. Seens it's not a above 5v controller.

Sodding hell just realised my ADHD is gonna be fun today im watching the tv, my phone and psrt reading a book none of which i can concentrate on for more than ten minutes.

I like controlling my LED strip with arduino and i have written (stolen + modified) some very nice rainbow effects. I very much like the SP002E controlles aswell ( because of it' s cheapness). Is there a way to implement your custom code to the SP002E microschip? i know it can "pass through" the Arduino code, but using arduino to controll led-s seems a little overkill.

Do you have a way we can send electronics so you can reverse engineer them. I have a set of LED headlights that have started going dim and losing light on one side that I'd like to send for you to make a video

"oh cool, a new clive video. huh, I wonder what spooze is."

What's the new bench surface ? It's not as clear for objects like the leds, with thin dark wires and clear housings. Presumably good for light-coloured things.

Wonder what the data stream would look like on an oscilloscope.

Will you have a look at the "pixels" too?

So the first LED to receive the data assigns itself the first address, the next one the second, and so on?

Bit overkill, but I find raspberry pi zeros are great for driving these strings.

If only there was a way to make an RGB controller on my $800 motherboard control more than 120 in a string (and even that takes a software hack). I mean damn, it can handle 128GB of ram but the Asus designers can't afford to add 4kB and a sligthly faster $20 microcontroller? If they were worried about dummies drawing too much current from the 3A RGB socket most know to use an additonal power supply and put that in the user manual if not (5v 80A for mine, but had to split 2520 LEDs up into 21strings of 120, annoying when that messes up some effects when an Arduino can control 10's of thousands with appropriate power distribution). Really wish the signal amplifiers (SP901E x3) could also multiply the input data stream by 21 in series (same 360 input bits from the mobo repeated 21x before going to first LED) rather than simply act as a signal repeater/amplifier, but don' t think such a thing exists.

I was expecting just an 8 pin Attiny there.

The chip likely to be 'Nuvoton'.

is the 6 pin below the IC Jtag?

Do you know Which Is the chip used on this board?

🎄

Back in the 1970's, this would have cost hundreds of thousands, and would have needed a couple of tons of mainframe computer.

I remember that things like Neopixel strips have significant current draw once you start getting into higher numbers of lights. Is this simply because of the number of LEDs, or is the addressable part in each light 'node' a significant contributor to this?

How to pogram MCU in pixels controller

I got video of some lights I haven't seen before. I think it's probably RGB rather than pixel on coloured lighting, but the icicle/meteor set also has separate control of the individual light-strips, as well as duplicate bank control of the set. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3ihywwbWCDQ.html

_Shift registers be like:_ but *RGB*

That circuit users only 7 pins and could be done with almost any 8-pin MCU, no need for 20 pins.

It's crazy how small and cheap everything has become, I mean, 40-50 years ago, a circuit board would have easily filled a room, especially the chips and memory....

Hi. Can i use external reset button to change the mode and speed??

Is there a way to dim the LEDs using this controller?

how do i modify its firmware? i want to change the modes into custom ones made from me

Spooze?

STM8S103F2 or similar

Can this controller be set to static light color?

B.C. do you know when the Tattoo will be broadcast on TV?

Aussie50...