What COTS parts would you like to see?

[Greg Needel]

Originally Posted by JesseK

I would like to see a better solution for using LED's. Right now LED's paralyze my team with how many choices / setups there are, so usually there's a mediocre attempt at them but never a finished product.
- How do we connect power to the LED's?
- Which LED brand, model, and length do we use?
- Do we really have to care that each light is addressable, seriously?
- To control them do we use an offboard processor, use a Spike, or is there a better way?

Would love to have something simpler that doesn't depend on in-house custom circuitry or an arduino. Plug this 12" LED strip into this device, then plug this device into the PDB and into the RoboRIO using these connectors. Then use this sample code to get going with writing different colors/brightnesses or blinking lights to the LED's.

So we built a prototype of a product about a year ago to do simple LED control called the "blinkin Board"

The basic idea was to allow on a single board the ability to drive the WS281* LEDs or 12v RGB LEDs. The voltage buck 12 to 5 with 3 amps of supply is on board, so just give it 12 volts and it would work.

The real beauty (in our minds) was the fact that you can control either kind of strip with a PWM input, we were able to sub-divide the standard PWM signal into tons of discrete signals and using a provided chart teams could make their LEDs do things with no hard programming required. There are a bunch of jumpers on the board so you can select things like your team colors & strip length.



We got the prototype almost ready for production (needed a bit more DFM work and software) but we ran out of time as we needed to focus on other things (like the SPARK). We also were not sure how many teams would be interested in something like this to justify the effort to bring it to market. It is still something we can definitely make, we just need to figure out where on the priority list it falls compared to some of the other large initiatives REV is working on.