Smart controlled daisy-chain RGB LEDs
It's Sunday, there's a few hours left of the weekend....
…. so it’s time to make progress with this little project.
At the minute, we’re doing little more than making LEDs turn on and off. Big deal? Well, yes and no. Because we’re not using mechanical switches; we’re using a chain of LEDs and a sending coding computer messages to turn them on and off.
(note that the colours in real life are far more concentrated and vibrant and don’t create the nasty bloom effect – that’s just my camera trying to cope with a tiny point of bright LED light and making a mess of it!)
Not just switching them on and off of course. Also changing the colours. Individually.
We’re able to say “LED number two, you should be green” and it just does it. Or we can say “LED number one, turn off” and it goes out (actually, we’re saying “set your red, green and blue intensities to zero” but the result is the same).
What particularly nice about this set up, is that it’s completely hot-pluggable. You can start off with one LED, then add more later and instantly control them – no need to update firmware or make changes to anything else; simply plug in another LED and off you go!
Which, admittedly, isn’t particularly impressive on its own.
Where things get really interesting is when we stick an app on a smart device and let users control their terrain lighting from their phone/tablet. I just need to work out if there are enough hours left this weekend to get one quickly coded up for a demo……
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