4 replies to this topic

[nithins]

I'm in the planning stages of building a robot costume for my son. The project will use an Adafruit LPD8806 of 1 meter length controlled by a Netduino and probably just utilize the pattern from the tutorial. I have a 4 AA battery pack, but I'm not exactly sure what is the correct way to wire this up so that the strip won't burn out and also won't damage the Netduino. Would the recommendation be to use alkaline or rechargeable AA batteries? Should I hook up the batteries to the DC barrel jack and power the light strip power from the Netduino 5v pin?

Thanks!

[carb]

I'm in the planning stages of building a robot costume for my son. The project will use an Adafruit LPD8806 of 1 meter length controlled by a Netduino and probably just utilize the pattern from the tutorial. I have a 4 AA battery pack, but I'm not exactly sure what is the correct way to wire this up so that the strip won't burn out and also won't damage the Netduino. Would the recommendation be to use alkaline or rechargeable AA batteries? Should I hook up the batteries to the DC barrel jack and power the light strip power from the Netduino 5v pin?

Thanks!

Nithins,

Do not try to power a 1 meter strip from the Netduino 5 vdc regulator. Per the specs on Adafruit.com that you linked to the strip pulls 120 ma for every 2.5" of length that you are planning on using (with the LEDs on at full brightness). That would be almost 2 amps of current.

You will need a separted power supply of around 2 amps for the strip. Make sure that it a regulated supply. 6 vdc will start to damage the strip.

If you want to power from a battery you will need a regulator and most likely a gel cell or Sealed Lead Acid battery 6 or 12 vdc 4 amp hour or more depending on how bright, color and duration that the LEDs are going to be on before rechaging the battery.

Edited to add link: Tutorial on using batteries to power RGB LED Strip

Hope this helps,
Chuck

[nithins]

Edited to add link: Tutorial on using batteries to power RGB LED Strip

Thank you so much for that tutorial link! I completely missed that on the Adafruit site. That's exactly what I needed.

[greglee]

when connected a 5m lpd8806 strip to my Netduino, and I'm running a simple test using the code in the tutorial. But the first two LEDs closest to the input stay on full-white all the time. This persists no matter what I've tried. If I write a simple loop to address each pixel, those two LEDs will flicker slightly with the assigned color, but they mostly persist as white. So do you what could be happening?

[Stefan]

Maybe it's a silly suggestion, but have you switched the input with the output side? When I did that I also only had emitting white LEDs