I’m just looking for ideas here on how other teams put LEDs on their robot just for looks. Any ideas?
We’re planning to use some flat channel and shielding, which we’re hoping both diffuses the light and protects the LED strip. Something like this from Amazon!
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You can do some pretty cool stuff with these:
They can be controlled off a PWM port on the RIO, and for power anything regulated 5V will work.
In 2019 we put a pair of 10" screens (like, actual HDMI monitors) on our robot and played memes on them depending on what the robot was doing (controlled by a RasPi, receiving binary inputs from the RIO via DIO, for a total of 16 different combinations).
While waiting in line for the practice field at Worlds, one of the kids hooked a Switch to it and the drive team played Smash Bros on the robot.
The most common way is to use some WS2812 LED strips. It’s super easy, just connect signal to Rio PWM and control via the Wpilib class.
One important note: these strips use 5v, and draw too much current for the VRM to supply for most use cases. You’ll want to use a cheap 5v output buck converter from Amazon or other to power them, and wire the buck into the PDH.
As for diffusing, you can do it in many ways, probably the easiest is just to take some polycarbonate and hit it with some 240 grit on an orbital sander. That’ll give it a “frosted” finish, then you can use some 3M clear double sided tape to stick to the LEDs. I’d share a picture, but it’ll be in the 8033 reveal in a few days anyway 
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We use a 12V addressable strip that we control through a PWM port on the RIO, and power through a the PDH using a buck converter.
While versatile and powerful, I found the default implementation of the AddressableLED class quite unintuitive to work with. So we made a wrapper for it that I did a writeup on, just a few hours ago (including a link to the code of the wrapper itself)
Hardware/electronics wise, we use these:
Links in the post are from a Dutch store, but I think you should be able to source this (or at least something comparable) locally as well
This animation from our Power Up machine is 170 WS2812B LEDs with a frosted polycarbonate cover suspended 1/4" over them with a 3D printed grid between the LEDs and cover.
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