LED strip lights

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
#21

So each time you send an LED frame, each LED sends its frame to the next. That means if you slowly sent nothing but red frames, you’d see the red light moving down the strip in real-time. The best option for doing something like what you said would be to send the whole sequence of colors again. To make it easy, you could have an array of RGB pairs and a function to update the light strip after you set any value.

#22

One thing that is very important to note is that this is only for APA102C led strips. Pololu sells them as just that, and Adafruit sells them as DotStars. The one you linked probably uses a different protocol (not sure, I didn’t check) and the NeoPixels Adafruit sells are yet another type (don’t use NeoPixels for this, the timing is too strict.)

#23

Avoid using single wire led pixel strips like WS2812 or APA104. Use the SPI input ones such as APA102 because you will never achieve correct timing with the others using robotC.

#24

@factorsofx @_7682 Thanks for the info!

#25

No problem, did you get your strip working?

#26

@factorsofx Oh, it hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

#27

@factorsofx thanks so much for the info and as soon as ours get here tomorrow hopefully we will let you know how it goes!

#28

there are many led strip is 5V , such as digital individual led strip ,like SK6812 and ws2812b led strip

#29

If I may ask, how does the sendByte() function work? How many ports does your strip occupy ? Thanks

#30

What are the steps to wiring led lights? My team currently have a led strip that has 4 pin wire so do we need to rewire the 4 wires to a 3 pin wire so we can plug it into the cortex? Also, how would we wire the led wires if we have multiple strips in various places?

Thnks

#31

Would a LED strip noticeably drain the robot’s battery?

#32

I’d actually assume that you can wire the lights with 2 pins instead of 3… Mainly because the VEX LED lights(Not light strips) uses only 2 pins instead of 3. Then setting the lights in the motors and sensors setup in the “VEX LED” category. And I have no idea what you are talking about “How” you will wire the wires in various places…

No I don’t think so… I should be just as much power as to keep a sensor or a VEX LED on…

#33

this is quite simple, cut the strips into the sizes that you want. then stick them onto the different locations. then get some wire (not sure about the legality of this) and solder all the strips together. then connect one end of the circuit to the cortex

#34

I believe that this is legal because the light strips are considered decoration and not part of VEX, and it prohibits soldering only for VEX if it is already repaired:

#35

@CATaclysm Delta_II yup, that’s what i was thinking, because using LED definitely require at least some custom wiring.

#36

Thnks guys

#37

Cool

#38

I saw these lights the other day and I was thinking about it. Could you run these off of say, a UART port since these lights connect the light controller with 4 pins?
BEILAI 50cm USB 5V LED Strip Light Kit
If so, could you program the RGB functionality with the UART port?

Edit: So, on the cortex part specifications, It says it is used with the Vex LCD. Has anyone had any experience running anything other than an LCD off that port?
http://puu.sh/snBvb/c52724fa63.png

#39

I realized that the 4-pins on the UART are ground, power, transmit, and receive. So that won’t work for RGB lights I believe. please tell me if I am missing something.

#40