LED indicator lights

[Beaker]

We use 2 Adafruit NeoPixel light strips connected to an Arduino Mega to signal robot state and other values during the match. (We finally got them on for TRI, and it works great!)

- You have to solder a PWM cable or some type of wire to the end of the strip without wires because the other wires are actually on the opposite side of signal input. I use a scrap PWM cable that has a single male end so that I can plug it into the Arduino later.

- We connect the 12V side of one of those old radio voltage converters to the PDP and connect the 5V side to the light strip's Vin and Ground wires, which were soldered earlier. You could probably do this with a new VRM, but I'm just used to the older model.

- Connect the light strip's signal to a pin on the Arduino.

- The Arduino Mega reads values from the RoboRIO's DIO ports and our navX's Analog Outputs.

- For the programming side of things, make sure to install the Neopixel Library and the Arduino IDE. For more information on that stuff, you should look at the NeoPixel UberGuide and Arduino's website.

Also, we have a page of code releases here. Our light code from last year is in the LabVIEW code release. It uses I2C, but converting to analog/digital reading shouldn't be too difficult.


I know that this requires a lot of work, but it looks really cool when you get it working. I hope this helps!