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Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

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Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#41

Post by zaarn »

SethTro wrote: post #8

I'm working on several medium sized LED projects and am curious if anyone has a guide or links to buying WS2812 or similar strands. I've bought a ~10 of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZHB9M6A/ref=oh_aui_sear... but I would love to find a slightly cheaper source. Alibaba seems to sell them at half the cost but product titles, photos, and descriptions don't ever seem to match

WS2812 LED Strips on AliExpress/Alibaba/BangGood are sorta okay. I've got a few of them at home, some of them have LED's shortcircuited after they failed.

To some extend you get what you pay for but they're good enough for most purposes (and if they go too much kaputt you can replace them with another one for the same low price) and fairly bright too (about 0.25A of LED per meter and 30LED/m density)

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#43

Post by justwalt »

simap wrote: post #23

If you want to get a feel for what you can make, you can browse published patterns here: https://electromage.com/patterns/ I was interviewed by embedded.fm about Pixelblaze and some other projects https://www.embedded.fm/episodes/220 Might be interesting to other folks wanting to do something similar, we cover some of the meta around making and selling a DIY thing and learning things along the way. Highly recommend t…

What are your plans with respect to open source? I’d love to contribute to the effort!

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#44

Post by sdwisely »

tibbon wrote: post #42

This is pretty great. For my larger LED projects (3000+ lights) I'm slowly moving over to something like TouchDesigner for animations and mapping, but for medium and smaller projects this is fantastic. Will be buying some!

we've had really great results with TD tops into madmapper (via syphon/spout) on some installs 6000+ too.

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#45

Post by cuoverhere »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #5

Random question: has anyone seen a neopixel-compatible interface LED in a tinier package, like 2mm square? Would be great for some applications.

The SK6812/APA102s come in a 2020 package now, but I haven't seen them on a strip. @wow_elec_tron on instagram has been working on his own flex pcbs for them. I think he may do a kickstarter to get some in production.

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#46

Post by anfractuosity »

This looks a very interesting project! One thing I couldn't tell though, could you 'stream' LED pixel values over wifi instead of generating them on the hardware?

Using the ws2812b Lights and the: https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x library, I made my LEDs pulse out an ID, which I read with a webcam, then used it to make a simple webapp, to 'paint' my Christmas tree's lights.

https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/painting-a-christmas-...

This year I'm planning on buying some APA102 lights though, and taking it outdoors :) (So i'm looking at the IP68 versions). Ideally I want to create a 3D map of the LEDs this year, but I need to do a lot of reading on that!

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#47

Post by tibbon »

sdwisely wrote: post #44
tibbon wrote: post #42

This is pretty great. For my larger LED projects (3000+ lights) I'm slowly moving over to something like TouchDesigner for animations and mapping, but for medium and smaller projects this is fantastic. Will be buying some!

we've had really great results with TD tops into madmapper (via syphon/spout) on some installs 6000+ too.

Yea, some combination of that for projection mapping, and perhaps sending directly out to Artnet/sACN for LEDs, servos and lasers? Still trying to piece it together as things get bigger and bigger.

My contact information is in my profile. Can you reach out? I'd love to see some of the stuff you're doing and ask a question or two.

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#48

Post by tlrobinson »

anfractuosity wrote: post #46

This looks a very interesting project! One thing I couldn't tell though, could you 'stream' LED pixel values over wifi instead of generating them on the hardware? Using the ws2812b Lights and the: https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x library, I made my LEDs pulse out an ID, which I read with a webcam, then used it to make a simple webapp, to 'paint' my Christmas tree's lights. https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/p…

You can send it patterns in the form of code, but the hardware generates them, so I don't think you need to use WiFi once you've uploaded them.

Re: Pixelblaze V2 – An advanced LED pattern development engine and controller

#49

Post by tlrobinson »

This looks great. Just in time for that thing in the desert...

The pattern editing workflow seems nice. Editing C code and waiting for it to upload to an Arduino was never very fun. Being able to see a preview and quickly send to the controller over WiFi is a game changer.

One thing I like about those cheap WS2812B controllers (https://www.amazon.com/s/field-keywords=ws2812b+rf) is the RF remote. An add-on for the Pixelblaze would be neat. Just on/off, changing the brightness, switching patterns, and switching to auto cycling between patterns would be sufficient.

One more suggestion: support for 2D patterns (I guess it's just the previews that need support since you can do simple math to turn a 2D pattern into a 1D strip)

Also: open source, please :)

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