Monday 11 November 2013

Strip leds at 5v

Intro:
Are you looking to implement some leds on your project? Do you want a strip leds that works at 5v? Are you interest about strip leds? I hope that one of these questions you have answered to YES otherwise this post will be useless for you =).

I am going to describe what I got on Amazon for a few pounds, just to add on my project some strip leds that could work at 5V instead 12v as usual.


Items:


Teardown:

The strip leds came with a small controller with 3 functions:
  • Light: you can change the colour of the leds with predefined colours
  • Speed/Bright: you can change the speed and brightness
  • Mode: you can change mode between: fading, strobe and solid
In the video you can see how bright they are and a small demo.
 


Under the protective plastic you can find 3 buttons and on the back some components, nothing very interesting, the main chip doesn't have any info printed on it.



The strip leds is a normal RGB, you can see from the image below, it has 4 pins:

  • 5V
  • Green
  • Red
  • Blue
Great news that allows me to re-use this strip leds with my Arduino.




Testing leds: Google plus ( sorry I couldnt upload on youtube)


Arduino Test:

The final conclusion, this simple and "cheap" ( well still 4 pounds but for prototyping is good enough ),  is suitable to be connected on your Arduino.
Below you can see that I tried to give 5v and the Ground to the pin Blue, I got the blue colour.

What you need to do is to connect the 3 pins on your 3 PWM output and try to send values from 0 to 255.
The strip leds will change colour based on what you are going to send on each pins, it's easy, isn't it?