Any tutorials for total newbie anyone can recommend??
@Andrew_Tuline has some great tutorials here: http://www.slideshare.net/atuline/fast-introduction-to-arduino-and-addressable-led-strips
http://www.slideshare.net/atuline/programming-addressable-led-strips
http://www.slideshare.net/atuline/fast-introduction-to-arduino-and-addressable-led-strips
to help you a bit more, what are you looking for / what would you like to do? I am assuming it is led strips, but do you want to code, power up lights? With code is it colour, or patterns or something
So far, my best “tutorial” has been the demo reel sketch! I’ve gone into it and changed one thing at a time then checked the effects. You can delete chunks of the sketch if you want to focus on one part as well.
Will give that a try and see what I can work out can’t even get the leds to light up in the order I want them to at the moment
@Tejkaran_Samra
I want to make an led light for my grandsons my Idea is using an led strip cut into 3 sections 6 leds in each strip which I have wired serpentine style and run the demo reel program on which seems to work fine
My plan is for it to be button controlled first button will turn on a row of leds at a http://time.as a sort of brightness control ie when the button has been pressed 6 times all the leds will be on
Second button will change the colour of the lit leds
Third button will give various animations with the last press making the leds react to music if possible
Nothing fancy lol but beginning to wonder if it’s going to be easier using a bunch of common anode or common cathode rgbs with shift registers etc
@Shaun_Constantine I made an LED hat with 192 SINGLE color blue LEDs using shift registers etc. I wish I had known about FastLED at the time because it would be MUCH easier to make the same hat using LED strips – and far more versatile! (in fact, as soon as I find the right hat, I’m going for it)
Hang in there! Start with small steps. Get the first 6 LEDs in the strip to light up.
Then find a tutorial on adding a button (that’ll be one of the harder things to implement but certainly doable.
Then get the button to go from six to 12 LEDs. Then you’ll quickly see how to get to 18. Then it’ll be easy to change it up… maybe have the first button press light up the center LED, press #2 adds the four corner LEDS, press #3 does them all.
You can also find a tutorial using a potentiometer, so you could have all 18 LEDs on but dim or brighten them all at once, and then use the button for animations.
Others have already done the sound reactive, so that’s doable as well.
None of my projects to date have required the above, so I can’t give you specific examples, but I know I’ve seen sketches/code/tutorials for them.
I’ve found that searching in the FastLED Google+ posts can dig up a lot of information.
Thanks Allan that’s what I have been doing have already seen and tried the sound reactive leds with single colours and that worked a treat will keep digging think I have to study arrays more can get my fist led to light up on all 3 strips OK so that I have leds 0 on strip 1.2 and 3 then stump myself getting the second row turned on together with the first
What controller are you using, Arduino?
Arduino mega
my understanding is that you would need to connect three different button to three different pins.
Because you want to change what happens when the button is pressed you do not want to use the traditional button, which recognises when you push down, or when not, but you want to use the button so that you can see when the state changes direction. Thus you can ‘count’ when the state changes(IE from high to low or vice versa) and then turn on/off or do what you want, here is an example of what i have done(https://gist.github.com/Tejkaran/7db39f10e8f2fb42b8bfb52ddee22b1f) the Arduino example from their site is this https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/StateChangeDetection
you can replicate the first part for the second but adjust the brightness in it and make it when the counter ==1, ==2 etc all the way to 6.
I have no idea how to do music sync though