Wondering if anyone has found good LED modules (FastLED supported) for wearables? I’ve been using LED strips for years but they’re sort of stiff & that a) makes them hard to work with and b) limits their durability because they fold over, etc. Plus my last wearable used 15m of WS2801 (~900 pixels) so you can imagine how much extra backing material was stuffed in there
The traditional flexible pixel strands come in that bullet-shaped package or the larger half-ping-pong, both work well for signage but not so great in a jacket / hoodie / etc. I love the idea of using http://www.pololu.com/product/2535 (5mm RGB LED) but that’s gonna be a whole lot of soldering. In a perfect world there would be some modules out there that are mostly flat like LED strip, but as individuals with flexible cable between them.
Anyone seen a pre-wired strip with modules this size or know of a place in China that can produce custom strips? Thanks!
Thanks! Those are perfect. And of course searching back through this group I found lots of other examples. Should have gone deep into the posts first! Amazing what happens when you take a year off from buying LEDs. So many more packages available now.
You can also go the same route that @Larry1 took, which was to design his own individual WS2812B pixels (well, I did it for him.) Last I checked he was in the process of cutting 300 of them (they were panelized) and start soldering (ribbon) cable between them. Gives you total control over length of wire and proximity of pixels.
Thanks. I’ve been making wearables from LED strips for about 6-7 years now (since HL1606 were the only ones easily available!) and yeah, they don’t survive long… for any number of reasons, unfortunately More often than the ends coming off, I found that after a week of abuse in the desert, it was usually either single-LED failure within the package (ie. an RGB pixel is now just an RG pixel) or a complete break in the middle of the strand (no pixels past a certain point work any more) I finally settled on some ways to prevent those but nothing’s ever lasted more than about 2 years I hope these kinds of pixels will help with the flexes and stresses.
BTW it looks like you’re putting your pixels inside tubes, but if you’re planning on selling extras I do think you’d want slightly rounded corners (even if you don’t go fully circular) Good luck with that project! You’ve built some really cool things. I’m still curious how you got the LED strips inside the shoe sole Did you carve out a channel from the back, or go in from the top?
Thanks Ashley - I was actually considering that until Daniel pointed out that solution. I’d been away for a bit so I had no idea that individual modules were so easily available now. I ended up buying something similar http://www.aliexpress.com/snapshot/6150867516.html (pricematched down to $13 per 50pc.) Not completely flexible with spacing but it suits my needs and in the few places I need longer spacing I can cut & extend
Looking at the prices you guys are paying, I wonder why you aren’t buying direct from WorldSemi? I pay $11/M for WS2812B 60-LED strips with IP65 packaging, $4 for their WS2811 50-led string (5M), $25/M for the 144-LED strip with IP65 packaging.
For the plain 3m-tape-backed strips without any silicone sleeve, it’s even cheaper.
Those light strings you paid $13 for Steve, I pay $4 for in 50LED strings, terminated with connectors.
Their shipping is pretty reasonable via DHL/FedEx, too.
I haven’t used WS28x series ICs nor embedded LEDs since last year, that’s why I’m not buying from them or anyone else. At least not till they increase the speed of their ICs (while keeping the clock line.)
So the APA102’s are like the WS2812’s in that the controller is embedded in the LED, but they’re clock and data line based. Unfortunately, between a stupid ass’d protocol and a low clock rate, their data rate is the same as the WS2812. (N.B. I just checked in support for this on the 2.1 branch last week)
I have heard rumors/claims (though the company has yet to put up a shipping product) of what is, I’m assuming, the next generation of the APA102 - same data protocol, but a ~12Mhz clock instead of a 1.2Mhz clock. This would give an effective data rate of 8Mbps for pixel data - which, while not quite the LPD8806’s 20Mbps data rate, is still quite a bit faster than the WS2811/12. (Though, now that I’m writing out 24-30 lines of WS2812 in parallel, i’m getting aggregate data rates of roughly 12Mbps (accounting for other overhead) on some devices).
@Mike_Thornbury interesting - I had no idea WorldSemi did direct sales. Do you make online orders somewhere, or did you just contact them offline?
The $11/m you pay for LED strip is the same I’ve gotten from ali-express sellers for a while, but $4 for 50 individual nodes is way better than what I paid Since I’m really looking for strings / individuals (not strips) right now, I’d def. be interested in getting more at that price…
re: clock speed, for wearable projects I’ve tended to not need anything too fast anyway. With 500 or more LEDs in a jacket I can’t really do POV, video or for that matter even the standard rainbow/plasma effects and keep a good battery life. My patterns tend to be sparse, and prior to FastLED I used to under-clock the SPI, to get something like 24-36 hours of usage between recharging.
Now batteries are large enough (I use 10-20k rechargeable USB) that I don’t have to worry about it as much! But my ideal attribute for a strip/pixel is low power consumption when displaying black. I had some concerns when I switched to WS2811 but it hasn’t been too bad.
More often than the ends coming off, I found that after a week of abuse in the desert, it was usually either single-LED failure within the package (ie. an RGB pixel is now just an RG pixel) or a complete break in the middle of the strand (no pixels past a certain point work any more) I finally settled on some ways to prevent those but nothing’s ever lasted more than about 2 years