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

[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?

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Kris Verdeyen

We used this strand of individually addressable LED's from Adafruit last year:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/306

They have arduino code, which is what we used last year, which we interfaced to the cRio (clunkily) through a pair of digital outputs. This year, I took the Arduino library and adapted it to use the SPI.h interface in Wpilib, so we should be able to have the lights respond to a lot more robot, driver, and game actions, and the wiring will be simpler.

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

[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.

[thursam]

Team 118 used lights on their bot, Apex, last year. I don't know if they were LEDs, but they did have multiple colored strings/arrangements. It should be fine.

[ShadathChow]

Is it legal to hardwire LED lights on to the Power Distribution Board?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by ShadathChow

Is it legal to hardwire LED lights on to the Power Distribution Board?

I can't think of any rule that would prohibit it. As long as they don't violate any other rules (e.g. disrupting other robots' vision sensing), it should be fine.

[ShadathChow]

Thank Alan.

[Lightfoot26]

We use these bad boys on a spike!

[MichelB]

My team bought them from AndyMark here: http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-2645.htm

You can buy them as a kit or seperate, but it does require an Arduino (comes with the kit)

[MikeD]

I got the strips directly from a Chinese factory, GREELED, which always keeping in developing new interesting products. Such as their newest developed 60 LED/M LPD8806 RGB Strip and 96 LED/M WS2812B Digital Strip. They also supply technique help in warm hearted.

[ILAMtitan]

We used these on our robot and driver station panel: http://www.amazon.com/LEMONBEST-SMD-...ords=led+strip

You can see a little bit of them working in our reveal video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ALN_3AoyU

It's been brought up that these cheep LED strands use IR, so the are hard to control via the Rio, but we ended up taking the control box and manually wiring in three PWM lines directly to the FETs inside. This lets us use the 5V PWM output to control the intensity of each color individually, and the 12V line just comes from the PDB. I'm working on a write up that I hope to post soon on how to do this, and our team will probably make a custom PCB in the future for it that we'll share with the community.

[Bonzabonz]

Originally Posted by ILAMtitan

It's been brought up that these cheep LED strands use IR, so the are hard to control via the Rio, but we ended up taking the control box and manually wiring in three PWM lines directly to the FETs inside. This lets us use the 5V PWM output to control the intensity of each color individually, and the 12V line just comes from the PDB. I'm working on a write up that I hope to post soon on how to do this, and our team will probably make a custom PCB in the future for it that we'll share with the community.

We bought the same LED strip and built a simple control board using a couple of MOSFETS. You can control the brightness of each color by switching the MOSFETS on and off using PWM. The only problem with getting it to work off of the cRIO's PWM ports are that the PWM frequency is too slow (causing the strip to blink quickly instead of appear to be dimming). I read that the max frequency that the cRIO pwm runs at is 200Hz. Does anyone know of a workaround or a way to get the PWM to work at a higher frequency?