Anybody mess with addressable RGB LED strips (APA104)?

[Ken Moon]

Just got a 5 meter LED strip on a roll with 30 APA104 LED chips per meter (total of 150 LEDs), and a little wireless remote control.

These strips run on 5VDC.

There seems to be a lot of folks who use Arduino boards, and even Raspberry Pi's, to create custom "walls of LEDs" with these, that can even show an HD video display, if you can afford the LEDs.

The price was right, so I figure I'll see what I can do with the included remote (looks like change colors and do various sequences such as running lights), before I jump into a new programming environment. I'd also like to try one of the sound-activated controllers available for APA104, for an old-school light box effect.

If any of youse guys have played with these, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[EL34]

I have seen them but never messed with them
Sounds cool

[MakerDP]

Yeah I've messed with NeoPixels with my Arduinos a bit...

https://www.adafruit.com/category/168

They are super-easy to work with and you can do some pretty cool stuff with them. My son was making a NeoPixel watch at one point with the NeoPixel rings.

I've messed with doing sound level meters with them. Someday I am going to make some lamps that change color based on frequency response curves with live music. Blue for deep bass then go to purple, red, yellow and white the higher it goes. Intensity based on volume level. Could do some neat effects in an amp cabinet with something like that.

[Ken Moon]

Cool link - thanks, man!

It looks like the NeoPixels makes it easier, using the available Arduino libraries.

The only work I ever did with real-time code was a project that used Win XPe and the Windows Embedded Studio development tools (source code was in C++), so the whole Arduino thing sounds like a fun adventure   

I guess I'll take a look at the starter kits and the on-line lessons at Adafruit to get started...

[MakerDP]

Yeah they really are easy to work with and still pretty affordable. I didn't know they had standard-sized individual 5mm diffused LED's now. That opens up all new possibilities for them since they can be more-easily mounted individually.

Here are some really awesome generic tutorials on Arduino... http://tronixstuff.com/tutorials/

You have to scroll down a bit and they are on the right hand side. Looks like he is not maintaining them anymore... probably because he wants his book to sell. Basically everything in his book came from those tutorials.

All that frequency-based stuff I was talking about is probably a little too heavy-weight for an Arduino, which is not very well suited to floating-point math at all so FFT's don't really perform all that well on them. You can get a floating-point chip and interface it in but it's probably just easier to use a Raspberry Pi to do FFT's at that point. You could use a GEQ chip to divide the frequencies into bands too though. That makes it a little easier for an Arduino to do frequency-related stuff.

But for simple control of the NeoPixels, Arduino is the way to go.

It's probably also worth seeing if your LED strip will work with those libraries. They may have the same chip at their cores.