Animating an LED strip from a computer

USB-A to B Cable

Arduino UNO

5V 10A switching power supply

NeoPixel strip

Capacitor 1000 µF

Female DC Power adapter - 2.1mm jack to screw terminal block

Jumper wires (generic)

Resistor 475 ohm

<p >After seeing some captivating Christmas light and music shows, I realized I could make my own mini version of that with an addressable LED strip.</p><p >I decided to control everything from my computer, since the memory limit on a microprocessor is too limiting to store complex animations. Originally I was going to control the lights with MIDI, but eventually I realized that the easiest way was to use an image file. Each line of the image represents a new frame of animation. Not only does this make animations easier to visualize while editing, but many image editors have a lot of powerful tools that can make it easy to create complex and fun animations.</p><p >I wrote a small program for my Arduino that takes in a stream of data over a serial connection and lights up the LEDs from that. I designed a simple custom protocol with synchronized animations in mind. Then I wrote a program on my computer that could load an audio file and an LED strip animation, and play them in sync.</p><div class="se-component se-video-container __se__float-none" contenteditable="false" style="width: 100%;"><figure style="width: 100%; height: 56.25%; padding-bottom: 56.25%; margin: 0px;"><iframe frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H8Cmht5duso" data-proportion="true" data-percentage="100%,56.25%" data-size="100%,56.25%" data-align="none" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" data-index="0" data-file-size="0" data-origin="100%,56.25%"></iframe></figure></div><p ><span >It took about 20 hours to create the animation for this song. If you want to create your own animations, I recommend Paint.NET. You will also find a spectrogram very useful. You can generate them with this program: </span><a href="http://spectrogram.software.informer.com/16.0/">http://spectrogram.software.informer.com/16.0/</a><span > Note: animation bitmaps must be the same number of pixels wide as the number of LEDs on your strip.</span></p>

syncstrip binaries

Basic Connections

syncstrip

renderstrip

Animating an LED strip from a computer

By controlling the LED strip from a computer, you can do almost anything! I used it to create a dancing light show for music.