Hello! I’m working on an offseason project and I was trying to figure out where to wire LEDs to. I’ve read that you can wire it to the roborio, pdp or vrm. I’m not sure if any of this is right. If you can help that be amazing! Thanks in advance.
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Hi! Welcome to Chief Delphi!
It isn’t too hard to wire up an LED strip to the RoboRIO. This was discussed recently here in this other thread, so you could start by reading there.
My suggestion is always to connect them to a separate voltage regulator (that you can get from Amazon for a few bucks) which is wired to a PDP port. In theory you can plug it into any port with the right voltage capable of supplying the needed current (which differs depending on what type and how many LEDs you have).
The current draw usually rules out connecting to the roboRIO or PCM unless you have very few LEDs. You can connect them to the VRM, but I recommend against it because if the LEDs were to short, you’d take out your radio as well and sit dead the rest of the match. If you connect the LEDs to the PDP you can get basically as much current as you want, but the voltage output isn’t constant. That’s the reason you use a voltage regulator in between to keep a constant voltage so they LEDs stay a uniform brightness.
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Are you interested in addressable straps or individual LEDs?
We are working toward animated orange led lit 5892 signs. They use 6 strings of 9 leds to play well with 18 Volt Makita batteries. We will make them dance with ESP32 boards and Darlington drivers. These can be directly driven from most logic outputs and give you an open collector output with some real current capability.
ULN2003APG ULN2003 2003 NPN Transistors Darlington 7-Circuit Sink Driver, 500 mA 50 V HFE:1000, 16-Pin
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