Playing Around with a Neopixel LED strip

We’ve got an ambitious idea for Halloween… and one of the things I’m looking to work into our Halloween idea is LED lights. Specifically – programmable LED lights.

I took the plunge, and got a few supplies from Adafruit – looking to get some familiarity with how LED light strips work.

So far, I’m mostly studying a lot of tutorials and videos. I found this video helpful.

I have to say – seeing the lights come up was a delightful experience. It was exciting to see things working, and also exciting to not see my Arduino go up in a puff of smoke due to misconfiguration or faulty wiring.

For the most part – I just got adequate power to the LED strip. And loaded up some preset sketches via the FastLED library. I barely know what I’m doing, but seeing the results has been really, really fun.

One extra thing I did get to work out: I tested out a few micro switches. I’m not sure how well these are going to work, given than one of the switches seems to require a lot of weight to trigger. But at least I have a sense of how things should be wired.

For now, the switches work so that when they’re pressed… power is supplied to the LED strip. What this means though is that the Arduino seems to continue to run through the light sequence… and when the switch is thrown, the lights appear.

While the switch is off, the display/pattern continues to run… we just can’t see it.

This approach is ok for now. But hopefully in the near future, I can figure out how to get a little fancier with the spices.

For now – I’m having fun just looking at the pretty lights.

Related:
Uno > Nano

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