New year is coming soon, it's time to prepare garlands. A garland with addressable LEDs is the most beautiful - each of its LEDs changes color and brightness independently of the others.
Strings and controllers are usually sold separately. There are many different controllers - with WiFi, different effects, there are many homemade Arduino controllers. Today I will show you how the garland works with the cheapest one dollar controller.
Let's start with the garland itself. The best thing that can be found on Aliexpress is this addressable string with 50 large 11 mm LEDs (optical part diameter 7 mm) and WS2811 chips. It costs $ 7. The garland has full IP68 protection and can be used outdoors.
The garland has three-pin connectors on both sides, allowing you to connect several of these garlands in series. In addition, there are two separate power wires. They may be needed to amplify the power supply when connecting several strings (LEDs are powerful and there may be a significant voltage drop on long wires). When using one garland, these wires must be insulated or carefully cut. The garland consumes up to 1.2 A.
The simplest and cheapest controller SP002E costs only $ 1 without a power connector and $ 1.75 with a USB connector (in this case, the garland can be connected to a smartphone charger).
The controller supports up to 2048 LEDs. It has 76 effects, but they are pretty uniform. The reason is that all the effects are "wave" - the color palette moves from the beginning to the end of the garland, because the controller does not know how many LEDs are connected to it ( for more serious controllers, the exact number of LEDs in the garland is always indicated so that you can create effects with opposite traffic from both ends Garlands).
The controller says "5-24V", but do not be provoked: the controller itself works in a wide range voltages, but if more than 5 volts are applied to the garland, it will burn out, so only 5 volt.
The controller has three buttons, but they are not located under the front panel, where they are indicated, but on the back under the heat shrink tube.
By default, the controller iterates over all effects in a row. The extreme buttons can select any one effect. The middle button changes the speed. When you turn off the power, the set effect and speed are remembered and when you turn it on again, the same effect will work. Pressing the outermost buttons at the same time resets the controller and starts looping through the effects again.
What the effects look like cannot be described with text with pictures, so I made a short video showing all 76 controller effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch? v = 4m24AnUN-Hg
Despite the simplicity of the one-dollar SP002E controller, such a garland looks much better than ordinary ones. In the near future I will talk about other controllers that can be connected to this garland.
© 2020, Alexey Nadezhin
For ten years I have been writing every day about technology, discounts, places of interest and events. Read my blog on the site ammo1.ru, in LJ, Zen, Mirtesen.
My projects:
Lamptest.ru. I test LED lamps and help figure out which ones are good and which are not so good.
Elerus.ru. I collect information about domestic electronic devices for personal use and share it.
You can contact me in Telegram @ ammo1 and by mail [email protected].