Underglow LED Control using WPI_DigitalOutputGeneratePWM.vi

[Greg McKaskle]

Not knowing everything about the strip you bought, I have a few questions.

What color LEDs are you intending to use? If you only want blue strips, do you need more than two PWMs?

Another thing to consider is how much light you need. It is actually pretty easy to overdo it. The fabric is 600x brighter than white paint. Getting the LEDs near the camera lens is far more important than the brightness.

Greg McKaskle

[RyanN]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

Not knowing everything about the strip you bought, I have a few questions.

What color LEDs are you intending to use? If you only want blue strips, do you need more than two PWMs?

Another thing to consider is how much light you need. It is actually pretty easy to overdo it. The fabric is 600x brighter than white paint. Getting the LEDs near the camera lens is far more important than the brightness.

Greg McKaskle

This isn't for the lines on the floor. This is purely for decoration / looks. It's an RGB strip.

[Dfontana]

Based on the name of the thread, I'm thinking that you're probably trying to create some ambient lighting underneath the robot's frame and not using this as a part of this year's vision system.

You have already pointed out your best option. You can drive them using the PWM generators for the DIO modules,but you will likely have to tie both strips together.

This may seem like a hassle, but in the end, it is probably the easiest to accomplish.

Alternatively, you may design and create a custom circuit to drive these. As our team is actually made up of a lot of students from the school's electronics class, this is probably the way we would go. You could use either a PIC or BASIC STAMP micro controller (Or any micro controller, really, though these are the ones I have experience with).

However, with this approach you could not change colors on-the-fly like you could if using labview with some virtual controls on the dashboard.

[RyanN]

Originally Posted by Dfontana

Based on the name of the thread, I'm thinking that you're probably trying to create some ambient lighting underneath the robot's frame and not using this as a part of this year's vision system.

You have already pointed out your best option. You can drive them using the PWM generators for the DIO modules,but you will likely have to tie both strips together.

This may seem like a hassle, but in the end, it is probably the easiest to accomplish.

Alternatively, you may design and create a custom circuit to drive these. As our team is actually made up of a lot of students from the school's electronics class, this is probably the way we would go. You could use either a PIC or BASIC STAMP micro controller (Or any micro controller, really, though these are the ones I have experience with).

However, with this approach you could not change colors on-the-fly like you could if using labview with some virtual controls on the dashboard.

My original idea was to use a PIC24, then use the PIC24 as an I2C Slave device and set it up that way... but with a full time job, then mentoring robotics for 20 hours a week, I simply do not have enough time to develop such a solution. We'll probably tie both together.