Comments on: Addressable RGB LED Strip

By: johnc

johnc — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:35:41 +0000

Xander…
Howdy.. I’ve been experimenting with your arduino hello world rainbow example with a piece of light strip about 10 meters long. It worked initially.. but now I seem to be running into problems. The pattern seems to arbitrarily stop at an intermediate point on the strip.. around 6 meters. The connections at the point that the pattern stops seem to be fine according to a quick continuity check. there are no visible breaks or solder problems with the strip itself, the HL1606, LED or chip resistors, The pattern stoppage does not seem to be affected by moving or flexing the strip.. so I think I’ve convinced myself its not an intermittent connection.. I have some evidence that the point the pattern stops seems to be pattern dependent. The one clue I have is that if I ground the LI pin just past the point where the rainbow pattern starts, I see a single LED version of the rainbow pattern propagate down the remainder of the switch without any PWM dimmed echos. THis is leading me to believe that I have noise or droop on the LI signal.. Do you think there’s a maximum length that you can reliably drive the LI when it’s in it’s ‘flush’ mode… probably the wrong terminology.. but I think you may understand what I mean ? It seems to happen on other similar length strips as well.. Any ideas what may be causing this ? Any ideas what I can do to fix it ?
Any help appreciated..
-jc

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:48:03 +0000

Cool! These sorts of things have actually been out for several years. The Color Kinetics iColorFlex, LEDEffects’ DingDotz, and Triklits. The first two were really display sign pixels, and a string of 50 was $500 plus the astronomical cost of the controllers. But the DingDotz (Now X16Dotz) had a “demo kit” of 10 lights with a preprogrammed controller chip for only $100, and I’ve had this for almost four years now. Been waiting to get a bigger string with full control. A couple of companies have been promising something as an affordable consumer item for a couple of years, but nothing has surfaced. I do see all sorts of stuff from Shenzhen and others on that Alibaba trading site, but don’t know where to find it retail. (The Shenzhen Video Belt is being offered by Wiedamark, but that too is a very expensive non-commercially oriented pixel string).
What I’m not seeing here, is prices, except for the Ebay site, which is in pounds. Also not sure whether you can make your own programs with this.

By: xander

xander — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:40:52 +0000

Sure, here’s the Arduino sketch for the “hello world” rainbow pattern shown above.

http://www.synopticlabs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/striplight_hl1606_gradient.tgz

By: JackC

JackC — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:36:49 +0000

Would you mind posting the code for the hello world example above? Just reading the library it’s difficult to tell a few things about using it, e.g. if latch needs to be called on each write, that kind of thing.

By: Mike Broom

Mike Broom — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:06:25 +0000

There is a UK one, it is not flexible (yet) which is bit addressible using shift registers, which can be found here:http://www.logic-magic.co.uk/products.htm

These were designed as a spin off from the original single colour units which a guy called Mark Hester prom PDD Design Cnosultants used to produce a animated mock up of a central heating boiler. He also used the arduino dev board to control the strip.
Each colour has a single OE line, so can be dimmed to produce multiple colours, besides the standard mixed 7.

There is a demo video of this on the fun stuff page here:
http://www.logic-magic.co.uk/files/muticolour_knightrider.mov

By: BenD

BenD — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:56:01 +0000

I got a quote from SHENZHEN COOLIGHT OPT-ELE CO.,LTD on this product:

CL-DGTF51920-32T3 (5V digital RGB flexible LED ribbon(32LED/meter))

they said:

>Our minimum order quantity is 5 Meters,the unit Meter is $25.
>Any problem , pls send me email.

By: Cody

Cody — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:28:16 +0000

http://www.ic2ic.com/search.jsp?sSearchWord=HL1606

Any help from above ^ with a quick search I did?

By: MarkP

MarkP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:16:34 +0000

Woah, long link! Try this instead: http://bit.ly/Fu9F9

By: MarkP

MarkP — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:16:03 +0000

This could be an option:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/New-5m-multicolor-SMD-5060-Flexible-RGB-LED-Strip-Light_W0QQitemZ120424361711QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_HomeGarden_Lighting_Lamps_Lighting_SM?hash=item1c09d9eeef&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12|66%3A2|39%3A1|72%3A1686|240%3A1318|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50

By: Nick

Nick — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:54:02 +0000

This is exactly what I need!

So where can we get this .