LED strip driver for ws2801 chip strips

[+karri]

A long time ago I experimented in connecting LED strips to lighting systems using QLC+ and as they were around and I was familiar with the driver I planned to release "Shaken, not stirred" with a LED to light up the environment while playing. The idea was to have a white/blue police light, red light while shooting and so on.

 

The problem with lights like this is that the data will automatically be visible when you have a 500us break in the data stream. In the Lynx I often got the break in the middle of the transition so there was some spurious lights.

 

Now when we just fixed the 64k eeprom I thought of fixing the LED driver as well. And I pushed it into the repo.

 

The way to use it is like:

lynx_ledinit_ws2801 ();
lynx_ledwrite_ws2801 (red, green, blue); // last LED in the strip
lynx_ledwrite_ws2801 (red, green, blue); // last-1 LED in the strip

 

ws2801.s

[LX.NET]

Wonderful! Which WS2801 do you recommend ordering for doing some DIY soldering to a one of your homebrew cartridges (for the buerner/flasher)?

[+karri]

8 hours ago, LX.NET said:

Wonderful! Which WS2801 do you recommend ordering for doing some DIY soldering to a one of your homebrew cartridges (for the buerner/flasher)?

I have only one roll of these LED's that I bought from ebay. The important thing is to get the voltage right (5V) and the chip right (WS2801).

The reason I bought this originally was to create a miniature stage with miniature light enclosures. I am also a developer for QLC+ open source light/sound software for theatre lights. And carrying large lights with me home for designing plays and shows did not feel so attractive.

 

In QLC+ you can easily map DMX lights to single LED's instead. So I can run the entire show on a miniature scene on my table with lights made up from small LED modules. So you just need scissors and a 4 pin ribbon cable for setting up a complete light mockup.

 

As my theater was small I always had less than a dozen lights. And no money for moving beamers, lasers or other fancy stuff. So the LED's were good enough for me. On my DiscoHAT (a Raspberry Pi for controlling lights) I had a DMX output and a SPI output for controlling LED lights. So writing a mapping layer allowed me to use any equipment in any theater by just adding a re-mapping layer for my scenes, chases and shows.

(http://discohat.com/qlc/ - my other hobby)

 

Some people use these LED snakes for special effects of scrolling text. But I only own about 50 LED's on a roll. So not much experience with these...