My first prototype LED poi! I’m a total beginner. Is there a tutorial on how to make patterns? I got the fastled color palette and adafruit strandtest working on them. I’m using arduino micro and ws2812 LED strip powered by 4xaa batteries.
No tutorial, just a bunch of code several of us have written for different things. It all depends on what you want to accomplish.
I hate to mention it now that you’ve built your spinners, but the WS2812/2811 chips have a disadvantage for POV (persistence of vision, the effect used for LED poi patterns), in that their PWM is only 400 Hz. Basically, about ever 2.5 mSec the chip checks its registers for the next PWM duty cycle (proportion of on time) - it cannot change color or brightness more often than that. But each chip’s PWM cycle is independent, so they don’t all change at once. And if you are using anything other than 100%/0% (255 and 0 values) for each of the three RGB LEDs (ie: 8 colors including black), that on/off cycle can be visible when a pixel is moving. (Actually the full on is 255/256 so there is always at least a tiny off period). Anyway, you probably know all this but it’s worth mentioning for any readers just beginning. Each chip in a series takes about 30 us for data transfer, so 144 chips (1 M at high density) takes about 4.4 mS.
A pixel chip with a faster PWM cycle is useful for POV/poi application, like the APA102 or the LPD8806; the data transfer to these chips is also very fast. The APA102 is a LED+chip combination, like the WS2812B, and is available with up to 144 LEDs/m, so it’s a good choice for POV effects.
Still, you can have a lot of fun!
Using the WS28xx is a good start, it gets you used to the programming and what goes into making toys like this. I started with them too before realizing that for POV, they’re too slow, I had to have upwards of 1-2ms delays between updates otherwise it would just get corrupt and not work. For POV, that’s an eternity. I used to have videos but I must’ve deleted them because I can’t find any now. However what I can find are pictures. Once you start spinning, the WS28xx series would end up looking something like this: Google Workspace Updates: New community features for Google Chat and an update on Currents and when I switched to using LPD8806, it looked like this Google Workspace Updates: New community features for Google Chat and an update on Currents - I went from forcibly adding delays in for the WS28xx to work, to removing all delays and just let the programming take care of it’s own speed - since it’s reading from a uSD card, that became the speed control.
And now I’m going to switch them all out for APA102s which will do away with the LPD8806 ICs and make things a bit easier for manufacturing and assembly on my end. But yeah, unless you actually like the block “feature” of what you would get with the WS28xx series, I’d recommend moving to something faster.
thanks so much! I’m learning as I go, and I did find that goofy pixelated look as a result. I’ll continue to play with these to learn the programming and to get the form factor figured out.