How do we get LED light strips to work on our robot?

FIRST General Forum
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This is my friend and my first year on a robotics team, and since we’re kinda rookies, we were tasked with connecting the robot to LEDs that would change colors based on inputs from RoboRIO, possibly using an Arduino (?). To be honest, we’re a bit lost on where to start; could anyone point us in the right direction?

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I have never done that but… unless there is already a full solution available.

1- start implementing whatever you want the arduino to do.
2- for communication i would say the easy way is use a few DIO port of the Roborio and wire them to Digital input of the Arduino
3- then code the values of the digital outputs in roborio to control the digital inputs of the arduino

3 pins gives you 8 values/states…
Or one pin for each function (but that’s wasting pins)

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This is exactly how our kids end up doing it most years.

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Thank you!

5

Our team just got these working!

Here is what we did:

  • Get any WS2812 addressable LED strip (we got these)
  • Connect 3-pin into a PWM port on the Roborio and connect 2 extra wires into VRM for power
  • Use Wpilib AddressableLed and AddressableLedBuffer to control them (documentation)

Hope this helps!

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Thank you! This really helped!

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