justified777

So after my thread, http://forums.netdui...ser-led-strips/, I set out with my netduino plus 2, bread board, seperate 5v 60amp power supply, quad 2 input AND gate, 4 WS2801 led strips, tried to make this work.  I've used the NETMF WS2801 code, every WS2801 code I've seen posted with the netduino to no success.

Now i'm at the point of just having a ws2801 33 led strip(I cut this off from the original) connected directly to the netduino plus 2 board. I have the ground on the led strip connected to one of the grounds on the netduino plus 2, I have the C(clock connection) wire connected to pin 13, I have the D(data connection) connected to pin 12, and of course the 5v wire of my strip I have connected to the 5v pin on my netduino plus 2.

I run the sample netmf toolbox RGB code...nothing. I've tried various other ways to do it but nothing is working. I get no response. Only time I get a response is if at the end of the led strip I press my finger upon the 4 exposed connections randomly on the strip it will make the last 7 or less lights light up variably in some random mess  

So, what am I doing wrong here? anyone? I've spent countless hours trying all sorts of combinations to no avail.  I've reached the point of reaching out to you, the community. 

Justy

Hey community.  This is my first time here.   I'm a tinker, programmer, triathlete gone chubby, type of guy.

I want to know how many seperate chaser LED strips I can run off of one netduino plus 2 and how would I go about doing it? I get the whole external power adapter thing and I have read the posts about SPI, but my understanding i can only have one SPI device per netduino plus 2 card(in reality there are 2 spi but one is used for the microSD card I believe). Ideally I would like the SPI that is available to be used to talk back and forth with my PC.  I have read that I could have 4 PWM 'outputs' but can each of these power and LED strip that could be 2-5m long and I need to have the LED strips be able to chase...meaning the whole data, timing thing, unless you have a different idea.   Also, I would ideally like to have 6-8 LED chaser strips and I'm okay with getting an addon to the netduino, if you know of one, or running two netduino plus 2 cards.

I'm going to have one PC that will set the LED light byte arrays(or whatever the data format for each of the outputs so i can do this) for 4 seperate chaser LED lights. I will send these over(SPI) to the .net micro framework code that will put the data on the microsd for storage and there will be .net micro framework c# code that sends this data to the led chaser strips....so one strip might chase blue, another strip would chase red, and another stirp would chase white, and then lets say the 4th strip may or may not chase but might be a fade in/out between colors. 

My big unknown...is there 'outputs' on the netduino plus 2 that can power multiple led CHASER(digital) strips.  PWM?  UART? I'll dive in more on knowing the details to make this work if someone out there can confirm what I want is doable and what type of 'output's on the netduino plus 2 would be best and how many per card?

Thanks,

Ken