Stumbled upon this while looking for some LED strips. Wheres a good place to get started? A tutorial or overview of someones setup would be great. I have never used Arduino
Thanks
Yep. You can only drive a short length directly from the Arduino power rails (a couple of meters, really).
More than that, and you’ll need an external power supply (either 5v or 12v depending on the strips you get).
Attach the + and ground lines from the power supply to the + and ground lines on the strip, and also attach the ground line to the Arduino ground pin. With that many strips, you’ll want to connect each strip to power separately. If you only had two strips (4-5m each) you could daisy-chain them, but more than that and you’ll need to inject power at several points.
I strongly recommend first trying just one strip (4-5 m). Get that working and then scale up. (See the “Telescope Rule”: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TelescopeRule )
Also, my opinion is that for ‘large’ projects like this, 12volt strips are easier to deal with in terms of power distribution that 5volt strips. (Annoyingly, it’s often easier to start out and experiment with 5 volt strips, so at some point you may want to switch. )
You’ll also run into RAM limitations; each RGB pixel on your strip takes up 3 bytes of RAM, and the Arduino Uno only has 2048 bytes of RAM to work with. Realistically, that means a max of about 500 pixels. At 60 pixels / meter, that’s 8 meters. (At 30 pixels / meter, that’s 16 meters.)
For more RAM, and for the processor speed you’ll want to run all those pixels, you’ll probably want to use a different microcontroller. Check out the Teensy3, or the Arduino Due. Both are faster and have more RAM.
And again, since this is your first project like this, I’d strongly recommend doing a smaller test/play version first: a couple of meters of LEDs and an Arduino Uno. Once you get your bearings there, you’ll have a much clearer idea of how to scale up.
Ok thanks a lot for the info. Im going to give it a shot!