Lighting – Rebooting Electronics

Converting the NeoPixel Driver into a Text Display

Posted on July 10, 2022December 31, 2023 by smayze

At the local open workshop ZAM, there came a project idea for a text display that is publicly available. After some experimentation with a commercially available unit – that proved to be too cumbersome for public use, we explored creating our own. In this post I describe how I adapted my original NeoPixel driver project – Expanding the NeoPixel Project – to create a text display unit still using an ATTiny 1614 and a single shift register.

Getting Started on Christmas Workshop Idea

Posted on December 3, 2021 by smayze

The local open lab sent out a call for ideas to run workshops over the lead up to Christmas. I thought of a Christmas tree with candlelight LEDs. I needed to know what was involved in making such a model before I could conduct a workshop. In this post I describe the that approach that I took and the improvements I came up with as a a result of trying it out first hand.

Using a Motor Controller to Drive a LED Chain

Posted on October 11, 2021October 11, 2021 by smayze

In a previous post I explored a technique to connect a chain of LEDs in parallel and enable the LEDs to blink alternatively in a series of animations using an H-Bridge. Since the H-Bridge is used extensively in motor controllers, in this post I take the experiment one level further and use an integrated motor controller to drive the LED chain.

Bidirectional LED Driver

Posted on December 23, 2020 by smayze

I became interested in a LED display I saw in a beer garden over Summer. The remarkable thing was that it was clearly LEDs on a bus of only two wires. Even so the LEDs were able to be animated such that they could blink in unison or every other alternatively. I was intrigued as to how this could be done.

The purpose of this project was to come up with a means to to alternately blink a chain of LEDs either in unison or alternately using only two wires. During the development, what I had not realised until quite late was, I was actually using a H-Bridge

RGB LED Controller

Posted on October 4, 2020 by smayze

I have looked into using Neo-pixels strips and I was really impressed with the simplicity of use. Now I was curious about controlling a matrix of individual, non-addressable RGB LEDs. So I searched out a LED Matrix driver that looked like it could handle RGB LEDs. My search ended with the IS31FL3736 12×8 DOTS MATRIX LED DRIVER WITH INDIVIDUAL AUTO BREATH FUNCTION. This seemed to have the features I wanted to start out with and did not require me to install masses of LEDs. This is a note about what I learned along the way.

Continue reading RGB LED Controller

Expanding the NeoPixel Project

Posted on March 7, 2018March 10, 2018 by smayze

Playing with some animations of the single LEDs strip of my NeoPixel board was nice but the thoughts soon come to mind: “It would look better if there were more strips”, “…if there were more strips, how could they be coordinated”, to “Could I still use the ATiny1614?”.

Continue reading Expanding the NeoPixel Project