Hoop skirt I made for my wife. 224 WS2812B leds, controlled by an Adafruit Trinket Pro. Powered with a usb powerbank. It will run many different color pallettes, changed with a push of a button. Gonna give her way more attention than an introvert usually wants, but it’s tons of fun!
Definitely gotta give a huge thank you to Marc Miller (can’t seem to find you to tag in the huge list of marc millers) from this group for the massive help editing the code @Erin_St_Blaine originally made, to help make this possible.
@marmil , the not paying attention to what voltage my controller data was :-P.
I was kinda shocked, I’ve never done anything with so many pixels, so the fact it all just went together with very little issues is nice. We’ll see how it goes at oregon eclipse, when you add in dancing and moving a lot, lol.
As far as the run time, it should be pretty long. I’m running a 22Ah power supply, with a max current supply of 6A. So, absolute minimum will be almost 4 hours. I have a hip bag with 63 pixels running pretty much the same program at higher brightness, and it lasts 16 hours on a 2.5Ah battery. So I’m guessing I can possibly get over 24 hours outta this battery. If I just checked my current draw, I guess I would have a better answer, lol.
Love it! Turned out really nice. That’s going to be fun to play with.
Do you have any links/suggestions for a battery/power supply charging system that you prefer for projects like this?
I have started migrating some of our ceramadelics light pieces over to strip LEDs and the FastLED library. Current consumption on most is now about 2 amps and fear my old 6 volt 4 amp hour gel cells are no longer going to be up to the task.
thanks for posting, great work!
OK just watched the video again and noticed the fine print
I guess you are using a battery bank USB charger thats rated at 22 amp hours? Possibly something like this?
Thank you @Eric_Daine_ednspace . I’d love to see those! Just the name, ceramadelics, sounds awesome!
This had more LEDs than anything I’ve done before. So I went with a USB charger. The one I got has 22Ah, and a max current of 5.8A over 3 lines (up to 2.4A per port). $40 each. They can be bulky, and heavy, but so much available power!
Of course, it meant I had to chop apart a usb cable to attach the 5v and gnd (there are probably better ways, but that’s what I did).
Here’s the link to the one I got, plenty more on amazon. Be sure to look at the max output current total, and the max current on each port, they do vary greatly. Also need to get good fast charge usb cables to get the most current out of each line.
thanks for the reply @Post-Master_Sodium I have one coming from Amazon with a fast charger wall adaptor so I can recharge quickly.
I’ve used the smaller USB power banks for other projects but am only getting about 3hrs run time for this one. I had no idea you could buy them at this high of an Amp Hour rating.
As for connectors I have been using USB to barrel jack connectors. Like this…
for everything, I put the mating plug on all my projects anyway and this opens a whole ecosystem of other parts, like switches, extension cables, and splitters that you can tap into. Makes it easy but I guess at these higher amperage ratings I am going to have to watch my wire gauges.
Hopefully later today I can share a video of it working.
Pretty sweet @Eric_Daine_ednspace , didn’t know those existed, but I will definitely look into using those barrel connectors. Looks way less ghetto than chopping apart a usb cord.
