Quote:
Originally Posted by VeqIR
I really appreciate your team's emphasis on bling-ing out your robots to the brim with LEDs -- they are unmistakably awesome.
I know it's always an annoyance for us to wire up discrete VRs for our Neopixels, but how much power do those panels draw and how do you supply it?
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Thanks so much! We do tend to go overboard, but it's worth it
. We're on Newton this year, so come check it out when you have a chance.
The power is provided by 2 9A 5V buck regulators, but that's overspecced by at least 2x.
Over this weekend we managed to get tekerzOS Mobile working. Running the mandelbrot zoom video, which is the most power intensive thing we display, a 5000mAh USB charger ran for more than 5 hours. This is for driving a Beaglebone Black and a single 32x32 panel.
For your neopixel's, we were actually planning on going with a bigger neopixel layout this year (using the 144 leds/m strip), and I had designed a "PDU" for the strips. I'll see if I can find one of PCBs, and I'm also happy to send you the Eagle CAD designs for it. It's got Anderson connectors for input, and can handle up to 18A on the 5V side, as well as providing buffered logic for driving the strips.
The PCBs I had made for testing use 1oz copper, if you want to max out the power (and really, who doesn't?) SEEED can do them in 2oz.