I set up 6 strings of those 3 wire LEDs as part of my outdoor christmas lights. Controlled via a Raspberry Pi and a Fadecandy controller, with the actual control software running on my desktop PC.

I bought a three wire string of these and as Julien Ilett pointed out, the green/white wire has a two pin connector on it. Then there are another two bare wires in red/white for 5v power. But I also saw, coming out my controller were three wires to a simple JST three way connector. When connected to power, there is 5v across the red/white. So I think if I swapped the two way on the string for a three way to include the red wire, I can run it all off one 5v power supply. Would that work?

Hey Big C :) I do like the addressable LED strings. I use led effects in a display for xmas. Programming lights to sound as the americans do! We do take over the neighbours house also to make the display look good. I use gear from a company called syncrolight uk based in fleet. Most of the controllers use the RS485 data signal but it does have it moments.

I am using ws2811 pixel led for my running board. Also I have used 6 chain ( 300 led ) in a board. But I don't know what is the power adaptor i am going to use... Let me know pls

Next project: Make a low resolution display with these bad boys.

The trick thats used to drive these are (ab)using a peripheral spi driver. That handles outputting the data freeing up your micro controller considerably compared to bit-banging.

I've got the Neopixel version, 12 LEDs on a ring, running on an Arduino. It's really easy, I'm using the library provided to actually send the pulses out, you just feed it some RGB values and it takes care of everything else. Since the LEDs retain their colour if there's no data, you can spend as long as you like calculating patterns. A simple bit of code to rotate randomly coloured ones spun them round faster than you could see, and it wasn't particularly optimised. I've managed to send all sorts of stuff to it. It's going together with a 16-button keypad into a box to give a friend's little boy, he's mad for pressing buttons, she has to hide the TV remote control from him. So I thought I'd give him some buttons that do stuff. Also shoving in some red / green tricolour LEDs (just RG, not B) and a piezo speaker for musical beeps. Think he'll like it. I've suffered the same problem as the people who designed the controller in the video. It's actually hard to think of interesting things to do with a string of LEDs!

Guys is possible to find out this type of LED String with 20 cm distances between leds?

I really love the first effect, and would be the only i will be using. Gotta order me some of those.

I love the addressable LEDs (particularly the newer smd5050 packaged ones with integrated control chip) An arduino is plenty powerful enough for complex animations with those (or even many of the ATTiny's if you want a mini 8pin device) Great fun!

Pretty nice lights. I am using them on a christmas tree lol. Though I have seen the addressable straw hat LEDs that have circuitry in the led package itself. Can't you make a string with those and save on some space and material?

Hi, just wondering if you could share a link for the controller?

If you are still experimenting with Addressable LED's, they work really well on Arduino's or on Espressif's ESP8266 and ESP32 chips. Not sure how far you want to go with them though :). I know this was a few years ago

I installed these as signage in my homemade arcade cabinet. Keep having the color blue failing.

I made an LED String Controller using an AT-Tiny84 (with code for an arduino trinket) for driving WS2812B LED's (you can buy these on strip tape) I was able to program much nicer fade and chaser effects. Very easy and very cheap!

I have the WS2812b with a 16 universe artnet controller....lots of fun experimenting different stage design for eye candy effects.....i might check out these ones now

I don't know if this has been said yet but there is a rather simple arduino sketch that can drive these. neopixle library works as well.

Have a look at FastLED, its a better library than the hugely bloated Adafruit one! Also they run well on a Attiny85 etc About 100 pixels I think before it runs out of ram!

SPI driven APA102 is a key, you can drive them fast, you can drive them slow. But they are so sensitive to heat, I damaged several units on my board by reflowing with heat gun under the board. I was so frustrated trying to get thing work. They still work and do pwm color when you glitch them with power on/off but does not respect spi input at all. Also killed one with soldering wires directly to the pads and I do not use rohs solder.

Have a look at the Naze32 quadcopter flight controller, It has the ability to run addressable led strips and can change the patterns in real time depending on what inputs you send to it.

Hi Clive, love your channel, have learnt loads. The WS2801 with an Arduino controller when combined with software on an HTPC make a great TV watching enhancement, an Ambilight clone. Many examples on KZfaq and instructions on Adafruit. Keep the vids coming! AM

where did you get the controller board?

Could you wire a usb into the chip and plug it into your pc?

The "easy" way to handle these speeds that I found is to use a buffer chip, which takes the data from the uC (an atmega in this case) on a 8-bit bus. Then it spew out serially, using lowest possible timings, giving the atmega time for calculations. This way you don't have to juggle through sending-calculating, the sending is just one port `mov`

I've been curious why these microcontroller programmers don't set up a few variables to alter basic sine wave noise functions. Sure, shifting through the rainbow effect is cool. But if you set up a noise function right, one line of code (in a for loop, or 3 lines per color per light), baring a few input variables, could output seemingly 10s of different modes. That's how I cut down on rom when writing attiny/arduino led code. Set up maybe 3 doubles variables to multiply time, offset, and magnitude values of sin/cos within other sin/cos functions adding the different variables together for additional offsets in animation. You can get anything from random colors to waves of smooth animated colors. I set up an arduino with LED blending between previous values, 9 different modes, IR remote control, and still had room in the 32k of rom. The IR and LED blending is what killed most of ram and rom. 8k of rom is a lot if you know how to program for it, well, bearing any bootloader, if at all.

Where can I buy that controller?

is it ok to link to one of my videos ? Its a 8x8 array of red LEDS displaying a scrolltext

I am looking for a similar light set that is very bright. Only 8 led string with the ablility to turn each on/off separately along with color and brightness. Seemingly this would not be a challenge given the technology these days but have spent countless hours trying to find. Can you help me?

I have them loose with the mcu inside like ws2812b. When powered on they're blue. You can do anything with them if you use the fast led library. Thryre pricey though but worth paying 100 for a thousand. They're beautiful when lit

Hello Clive, What is the microscope you are using ? I would love to find something like this. Thanks.

Regarding the timing requirements for the WS28xx/'NeoPixel' - have you considered the APA102/'DotStar' types?

hi sir tell me online line wabsite i am get this led

I just picked up a set of 1/2 price Lumineo 'Dancing Lights' pixel lights. They look similar to the 'Twinkly' system, and I was hoping their app would work, but AFAICS the Twinkly is wifi and the Lumineo is Bluetooth. The Lumineo is a 2 wire +1 system, where the +1 is a single wire the length of the loom connecting the 1st light to the last, with no other intermediate connections. I'm assuming it's some sort of Powerline style signalling on top of the 2 supply line wires, but could be modulating the whole supply. I noticed the Twinkly system includes a couple of (RF?) suppressors, visible either side of the control box. Nothing similarly visible on the Lumineo, but its control box is sealed, so there could internal stuff (or not). The presets are pretty good but the Twinkly control system looks very impressive, although neither have a full user control option.

Is it possible for you to produce an update for 2019 (well 2020 at this late stage)? I have been looking for something like the Twinkly Lights but the cost makes my balloon knot tighten. When my Google search threw up this old video on a similar subject I knew you were the man for the job because your John Lewis video was seminal in stirring my Christmas spirit this year. =3

I'd actually love to see you take apart a set of "Twinkly" branded lights. I'm curious as to how they appear to be doing addressable LEDs on a 2-wire string.

Addressable pixels are easly driven from a PC using dedicated hardware to send the data stream to the pixels. Common controllers used by the Chrismas light enthusiasts is either the SansDeviced E6802 or the DIYLEDEXPRESS DMX Bridge. They convert DMX data sent from a PC or Raspberrry using and industry standard Networking protocol E1.31. Those controllers can handle several thousand pixels. For software on a PC Vixen is very good as well as HLS. Once sequences are created and set to music, A Raspberry Pi running Falcon Pi Player can playback the show without tying up the PC. More info can be found on doityourselfchristmas.com

the arduino code for ws2801 is really good.

Hi Uncle Clive! I've seen all your videos! Great job and loads of useful content! Thanks! Quick question. Where do you source your addressable leds? I need quite a few strips and cannot find a cheap'ish supplier.. cheers

Hey, do you have any links for the RGB controller you briefly showed? Thanks in advance :)

If you want an easy way to program and play get a raspberry pi and add to it a great (cheap) robot control board called PiconZero from 4tronix. Can control up to 64 LEDs through simpler Python programming. Well worth a look. PS love your channel!

The "OctoWS2811" library implements the effort and timing in a creative fashion by abusing the DMA engine in a small ARM CPU. This lets it drive 8 channels at once with very low CPU utilization, leaving plenty of horsepower for generating patterns or even video.

hi clive the best think to program these is a arduino which will control the other leds as well can program them with a arduino software get one and have a play its good fun

The MCU used in this is probably the STC15F105W made by STCmicro. Essentially it's a super cheap chinese 8051 microcontroller. There's a datasheet linked on this page for anyone interested, though it's mostly in Chinese. www.stcmicro.com/STC15F101W.html

funny how they call them pixels. I can imagine why a little but I guess they're more used as a chain to hang down a tree or something than putting them in a fixture in a 2D array and use it to display characters or icons. You'd need maybe minimal 64 (8x8) to be able to draw one character.

You can use an arduino to drive those ws281* leds using the adafruit library to make it a little easier to drive them.

they could have the patterns written to the internal program memory and then the CPU is just reading out the memory contents

Hi Clive. I have been following you for a little while. I would like to know if you would be interested in taking in a project/repair. Brief description: one totally non working falling snowdrop tube lights, approx 3ft long with approx 88 led lights.,and now parts taken, second one blew for some reason when used as a window display. Should be able to run 10 off of one power supply but second light was used as a single.

I cringe at the thought of wiring up a string of addressable lights by hand but I think we could get as good or even better addressing using old-school bi-lateral switch circuits. Or we could use a bunch of cheap SOT-23 Pic micro-controllers wired as a crude swarm. (kinda like an 8bit Beowulf cluster?) za.rs-online.com/web/p/microcontrollers/6989053/

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No-one asked where they can get your wooly hat so I'll be the first!!! Ever thought about getting them made with your logo? I'm sure they'd sell like hot cakes!

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bigclivedotcom: KZfaq unsubscribed me from you. :(

I just found your channel, thank you for sharing with the world! The Teensy 3.1 library from PJRC can run about 4,000 WS281x pixels on a single $20 board with minimal processor overhead. They are very easy to program (Arduino environment) and he has an adapter board for $10 that conveniently breaks out all the signals to RJ-45. Details on how it all works are here: www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_OctoWS2811.html

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