This year we actually have three different LED systems. We have some 12v LEDs on the PDB, addressables on an arduino, and a set on a Spike that we use to communicate with the human player.

Re: Robots With Decorative LEDs Onboard
 

This year our team put underbody LED's that were hooked up directly to a light sensor on the bottom of the chassis with no code involved. It lit up to tell our driver that the robot was lined up with the tape on the zone lines. It also worked while the robot was disabled so we could line up the robot for auton. Not terribly spiffy but pretty nifty.

Re: Robots With Decorative LEDs Onboard
 

Our team uses this kit on our robot this year.

Sylvania 72344 Mosaic Flexible Light Kit

They're not individually addressable, but they can be controlled via PWM with some minor modifications if you want to. We just use the IR remote that comes with it to set the colors/patterns before the match, then we can toggle it off during the match (we connected it to a Spike) to act as a "Ready to Receive a Ball" indicator to the human player. The LEDs remember the last setting they were on when power resumes so it works out nicely.

The kit also includes small extensions that can be used to route around corners and you can also find "Y" splitters for them as well.

Re: Robots With Decorative LEDs Onboard
 

Howzit!!

We have several LED systems we have used over the years.

We have addressable RGB LEDs that we run from Adafruit with an Arduino using the DIO on the sidecar for control. These were setup in 1 meter strips to form a marque display. Most of the code is loaded to the Arduino and you select the various scripts with the DIOs.

This year we have gone to a simpler system due to our small size.
We use the Sylvania Mosaic Flexible LED P/N 419493 purchased from Costco. The system comes in manageable sections that can be linked together and has corner adapters. It also has adhesive on each strip for easy mounting.

They are easily adapted to the FRC system. Just cut the A/C adapter cable and wire it directly to the PD board. They are a 12v system with an IR remote to change the colors, brightness and a few different flash/glow effects. Great to be able to change the colors or setup the Pit Disco for the judges remotely.

We have several installed so we can set up different colors on different portions of the robot. :D



Link to our reveal video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfKh6wgLArM

Good luck and have fun with it..

Any questions please send me a message.

Aloha,

Mr. H

Dem Lights
 

On 118, use LPD-8806 lights with weather strips from Adafruit.
https://www.adafruit.com/products/306

We control them using a Beaglebone but a Pi should work too.

Re: Robots With Decorative LEDs Onboard
 

My team, 1073 has LED's that are run off of the digital sidecar. We have 2 PWM cables running off of Digital I/O. We tied the 2 5v wires together, and did the same with GND. the 2 signal wires are used for clock and data. The only problem we've had was that the first revision of the code was power hungry, so we ended up using 80% of the cRIO.

Re: Robots With Decorative LEDs Onboard
 

Last year we had LEDs on the bottom of our pickup, which would fact the drivers in shooting configuration. A horizontal red strip would turn on when the shooter was at the correct angle. We had two vertical strips flash blue as the flywheel spun up, and turned solid when we were at the correct RPMs.

Re: Robots With Decorative LEDs Onboard
 

WildStang has used the LPD8806 strip that can be found at SparkFun.com in the past. This year we are experimenting with Adafruit NeoPixel strips, but have had some technical difficulties. We use the arduino pro mini to write to the strips.