Had a few questions before I really get into my project. It’s been a year since I’ve messed with the Arduino when I made her an LED mini mouse costume so I"m a little rusty. I’m making my daughter’s Elsa dress an LED matrix for Halloween. I am using WS2812b strips configured in a 23X15 matrix. The data line is wired in a serpentine fashion with power being injected at every strip. So data would just be coming off of 1 pin. Is this the best way to do it? I’ve got an ardunio uno, mega, pro mini and a teensy 3.1 with a octows2811 on the way. What would be the best board to use? I"m going to have simple animations, animations that respond to sound and possibly other sensors, etc. I"m hoping also to be able to play an animation stored on an SD card if that’s possible. To top it off I want to control over bluetooth with my phone (or is wifi better?). I’ve got the nrf8001 currently. Thanks for any help to make sure I start off with the right stuff.
So a handful of things. One is that right now, it will take somewhere between 10 and 11ms to write out a full frame of led data, the WS2812’s are slow.
If you use a teensy 3.1 w/the OctoWS2811 breakout board, you can split your leds out over 8 lines, which would bring you down to closer to 1.3ms to write out a frame of data.
Another thing is if you use the OctoWS2811 board, you can use FastLED’s OctoWS2811 driver - which means that you’ll be able to use things that require interrupts (which, I suspect, reading arbitrary control data over bluetooth will do).
I would recommend bluetooth over wifi because then you don’t need to worry about having your controller and dress be on the same wifi network all the time.
Thanks for the reply. So teensy with OctoWS2811 is the way to go over anything else as far as getting good refresh rates? So if I split my LEDs out over 8 lines, does that make things harder on the coding side? I plan on using the fire code again with a blue palette for example. I’ve never used LED strips in a matrix before so I’m wondering how much more difficult that makes it for me. Thanks again.
An ESP8266 running in AP mode means the dress carries it’s own SSID wherever it goes - and you don’t need to stand 5 feet away to get it to work. I’ve gotten a few hundred feet in an urban setting with an ESP12E
I am doing a similar thing with my granddaughter for halloween and have a ESP running it’s own AP with a web interface. If you are in range, your smartphone will bind to the AP and the webpage becomes available. Simples
Yeah but if the dress identifies itself as an AP that can fuck with routing for everything else on the phone. It is possible to get Bluetooth transmission distances of 30-100ft, you just need to make sure you’ve configured the Bluetooth radio hardware properly. Also Bluetooth will use far less power than wifi.
I started reading through a lot of documentation and answered a lot of my own questions. I’m excited for a lot of tinkering around and not getting any sleep. I’m sure I’ll be back in a week or so with some more questions as I try to do some things that are way over my ability.
Any examples out there with parallel output and matrix? I’m using the teensy 3.1 with the octows2811 board and I have a total of 12 strips. I have sets of 3 strips each in a serpentine setup. So 1 data pin for each 3 strip setup for a total of 4. I’ve looked at the xy matrix example and the parallel example and not sure how to make them work together. Thanks for any help. I’ve only got a few days to get this going.
