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Unread 08-08-2014, 21:36
Bonzabonz Bonzabonz is offline
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FRC #5052 (RoboLobos)
Team Role: Alumni
 
Join Date: Feb 2014
Rookie Year: 2014
Location: Cedar Park Texas
Posts: 13
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Re: LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)

Quote:
Originally Posted by ILAMtitan View Post
It's been brought up that these cheep LED strands use IR, so the are hard to control via the Rio, but we ended up taking the control box and manually wiring in three PWM lines directly to the FETs inside. This lets us use the 5V PWM output to control the intensity of each color individually, and the 12V line just comes from the PDB. I'm working on a write up that I hope to post soon on how to do this, and our team will probably make a custom PCB in the future for it that we'll share with the community.
We bought the same LED strip and built a simple control board using a couple of MOSFETS. You can control the brightness of each color by switching the MOSFETS on and off using PWM. The only problem with getting it to work off of the cRIO's PWM ports are that the PWM frequency is too slow (causing the strip to blink quickly instead of appear to be dimming). I read that the max frequency that the cRIO pwm runs at is 200Hz. Does anyone know of a workaround or a way to get the PWM to work at a higher frequency?
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