Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Johnson
We've used standard cut-to-length non-addressable 12V LED strips (Amazon sells lots of these in various colors) and this tiny board from pololu to control them: https://www.pololu.com/product/2802
Basically the polulu board is a simple digital switch (think of it like a spike without the ability to reverse the voltage polarity), controlled by a PWM signal. The linked one above is 3A but they also have higher current ones. The wiring diagram shows how to wire it up. Load is LED strip, source is either 5V or 12V (depending on LED strip voltage) from VRM. The PWM comes from a PWM output on the roborio. You do need 5V in from somewhere too; if you're using 5V LEDs or a PWM from a MXP board you can get 5V from that connection, or you can get it from the VRM or RoboRIO DIO. I think we used the Talon class in software to control the PWM output--set(0) turned the LEDs off, set(1) turned them on. Easy enough to do das blinkenlights from there with software timing. |
Thanks for sharing! We just picked up a few of these to experiment with since our 2016 bot would have had at least a few uses for any kind of LED driver feedback, but we couldn't find any spikes in-house at the time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg Needel
So we built a prototype of a product about a year ago to do simple LED control called the "blinkin Board" ...
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Cool! I will keep an eye out just in case something comes out.