LED Lights for the Robot (what do you use??!?!)

[Brian Selle]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Are you communicating to the Arduino over spi or directly to the lights over spi?

We are using the individually addressable LED's from Adafruit hooked up to a couple DIO ports and calling them directly from the cRIO using SPI in Java. Super cool... with one strand you can dial in any color/pattern you want.

[theawesome1730]

Originally Posted by btslaser

Super cool... with one strand you can dial in any color/pattern you want.

I have gotta learn how to do that. Is it possible in C++?

[Brian Selle]

Originally Posted by theawesome1730

I have gotta learn how to do that. Is it possible in C++?

Yes... should be even easier than in Java. Start with the C++ Arduino code posted on Adafruit and then replace the Arduino SPI calls with WPILib SPI calls.

[Woolly]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

http://www.amazon.com/Hitlights-Blue...words=blue+led

Just make sure that whatever lighting strip you use meets the custom circuits guidelines and is on an appropriate circuit. For instance, the lights we use need to be cut so we don't draw too much power from the solenoid breakout.

"3528 Type SMD"
That's great for Up Next, but where can I get some 1806 Type SMD?

In all seriousness, I was looking at some RGB Lights with separate leads for R, B, and G like these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA0WP0M58573. We'd hook the separate leads up to a 3-way switch, and use green (a team color) for practice, and red or blue on the field based on what alliance we're on.

[Domtech]

We bought a Ton of lights from Greeled.
We made a huge group purchase from there of both RGB and addressable.

Here is the RGB we bought, at about $32 a 5m roll with glue cover waterproofing.

They sell the same addressable strip as Adafruit for something like $85 per 5m roll with no waterproofing. It was a breeze to program on arduino using Adafruit's library.


You have to email for current pricing and to order, and I think payment might have involved wiring money, but it sure was worth it.

I should have a pic of my desk up later which has the RGB lights on it.

[Garten Haeska]

Just out of curiosity, some RGB light strips come with a IR controller, would we use these or is it because it is IR, it would no be allowed during competition?

[F22Rapture]

Originally Posted by Garten Haeska

Just out of curiosity, some RGB light strips come with a IR controller, would we use these or is it because it is IR, it would no be allowed during competition?

IR is fine, just no radio.

You may not want to be changing colors mid-match though

EDIT:

As a note on this please remember that you should ask for Brittney and let her know that Evan sent you, she will most likely give you a discount. Also all purchases have to be paid for via cash wire (chase charges a 45$ fee) or a western union money order. Also shipping is 3 day express air whether you like it or not.

please remember they prefers only big orders, for example when our team did it the order came out to over $2000 and $160 of that is was shipping. please email me if you have any questions. evan@evan-inc.com (mark your email as high importance)

they are amazing to work with and I am not trying to scare you away but please acknowledge that they make money off selling in bulk and thus they will not appreciate orders of 1 role for example.

New user, telling us to buy a bulk order with expensive shipping using only Western Union or Cash Wire?...... Tread carefully guys...

[Garten Haeska]

What about just having three switches on the robot, just for the 3 base colors, would that work, and does anyone have an example?

[ablatner]

We've been custom-making our ring lights for the past several years. In 2011, it seemed as if we were one of the only teams, and then in 2012 everyone had them. We just wire up 12 LED's on a circular cutout of perfboard. There are 3 series sets of 4 parallel ~3.5V LED's with appropriate resistors. We use white LED's, but you can use any color. The only restrictions are that it doesn't interfere with communications, other robots' vision, and other commonsense bad things.

[theawesome1730]

Our sister team 1987 had told me about controlling LEDs via solenoid breakout card. It works very easily for 7 color RGB strips according to them. I am not sure of the specifics, or even who to tell you to talk to. If I can get more information I'll post it.

[Becca334]

We use these
http://www.superbrightleds.com/cat/f...rips-and-bars/

And get blue/red/white.
The white we hook up to the PDB so it's always on, and it's in our chassis to illuminate it. The red/blue we put into any type of mechanism we have and they're both hooked up to spikes. We have a light switch that goes to a Digital I/O port that way programmers don't recompile code each match, we flip the light switch one way and its red when the robot is enabled - other way blue.

As an added bonus, turn both lights on for autonomous and since they're right next to one another, it turns it purple.

http://i.imgur.com/z9lww3N.jpg They look pretty snazzy and gives a different effect from all the other teams that mostly light up at the bottom.

[tuXguy15]

Hello. I was wondering how my team can put LED's on our robot and wire them up to be controlled by robot code. Thanks!

[theawesome1730]

So there are 2 basic ways you can control via code. You can use spike relays as on or off switches. The second way is to use a solenoid breakout to connect LEDs. To use that method is the same as programming for a festo only it runs on a single channel not 2. The neat thing about using the solenoid breakout is that it takes no extra space on the robot and you only need 3 channels to run 7 colors (if you have RGB LEDs of course). Be aware that there is a limit as to how many watts you can use, but for most scenarios you should be fine.

[Ginto8]

We have a strip of tri-color LEDs on our robot. One of our mentors constructed a small circuit with 3 MOSFETs, one for each color. We then control them through PWM, which allows us to have varying brightness for each color.

[tuXguy15]

Ok thanks guys. Joe you guys did amazing today and thanks for the help today with our robot drive. My mentor wants us to do the LED thing for our robot that we use for community events. So hopefully I can get this done.