This year, my team is about 10 pounds under the weight limit. Naturally, we thought of bling. I have been tasked with RGB underglow for the robot. My team has no prior experience with lights that are just for looks, and we need some guidance. If anyone knows how to connect some RGB strips to the roborio, and some code to make them glow rainbows, that would be great! Any help would be much appreciated!
I would recommend using an Arduino to make all of the code for the LEDs, and you could use DIO/pwm to control the Arduino code, or something to that effect. It could work out decently well. And Arduino code is pretty easy for RGB
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My recommendations for easy LED solutions are the Blinkin from REV or the LightDrive from AndyMark. For the Blinkin, just give it power and a PWM signal to choose the pattern and you have fancy individually addressable LED strips. For the LightDrive, you can use it to control four single-color LED strips over PWM, CAN or Serial.
If you want a more customizable solution, plenty of teams use an Adruino or RaspberryPi to control the LEDs. Then you can make them whatever color and patterns you want. This will take more electrical and programming effort though, so it might not be the best idea for something you want to throw on the robot at the last minute without needing a lot of time and effort.
Edit to add: If you have your robot done at this point, you’re in a pretty good position. You should probably try to spend as much time from now until bag&tag practicing driving your robot so you’ll be prepared come competition time. If you want to throw on LEDs to make the robot look nice, that’s great. But I wouldn’t spend too much time on it because it won’t actually help your robot performance.
If you aren’t using some relay ports, you could also use those and some Automation Direct or Spikes to drive them. Another easy way if you have DIOs or MXP DIO ports free is to control some generic 12V relay modules and 3 DIO ports.
If all you want is “always on” underlighting in a single color, you don’t need any controls at all; just wire it into one of your your “custom circuit” breakers. Done like this, it will be lit whenever the robot main breaker is on.
Edit: Caught the “Rainbows”. Do you want to cycle through rainbow colors, or have multiple colors illuminated simultaneously non-moving, or multiple colors simultaneously moving? These will have different best solutions:
Cycle through rainbow colors: As I said above will work nicely.
Multiple colors simultaneously, non-moving: Multiple colors of LEDs on a single always-on or single relay
Moving rainbow, multiple colors visible simultaneously: For this, you are going to need “addressable” LEDs, and will certainly want a driver for them.
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