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This project will help you create a halo of wild LED color whenever you go out I've been wearing one of these for two years at conferences, schools, burning man.. and Makerfaire and I always have happy people coming up to take a look. People will smile when you're wearing yours ! They smiled when I wore it here
The construction is simple providing you have the secret ingredient which is a length of RGB lighting strip based on the HL1606 LED controller from Wuxi Asic's Corp in China. I got mine while on a business trip in Shanghai. These light strips are becoming popular for signage and architectural lighting around the world. I have attached a picture of the 5 Meter strand I bought along with it's controller box. While they aren't common in this country (yet), there are several suppliers in the orient who will ship you some of this magic stuff. Check out these suppliers. Supplier 1 , supplier 2. There will be many more soon, no doubt ! (Note: watch this space.. I think I may be buying some of these stripes from China soon. I'd be happy to get some for folks if there's interest)
These light strips consist of a flexible copper tape with very (!) bright surface mount RGB LED's spaced at every inch. Each pair of LED's is controlled by an HL 1606. The strips are sold in many lengths each composed of shorter lengths which contain 20 LED's with 10 driver chips. My headband is made of one of those 20 LED segments.
The real trick to making this work was reverse engineering the HL 1606. This chip is a mystery.. with no English language documentation, and only very marginal documentation in Chinese.Using a scope, a demo driver I purchased, and rough translation of the documentation I was able to reverse engineer the signaling required to drive the strips.
The input signaling uses a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI ) bus which uses one data pin (D_I) .. and a clock pin (C_I) to shift in the control bits to load the color info to the strip. A Latch signal (L_I) is used to latch the data for one HL 1606 and pass it's old data to the chip on it's right. There is also a pulse width modulation (PWM) control pin (S_I) which controls color brightness and fades. Note this project does not use these fade features due to code size restrictions.. but they are very cool to explore.
Once I figured it out, it was pretty straightforward to program a micro controller to drive the strips. I used a PICAXE 08-M . I chose the PICAXE because a) I had them laying around :-) and b) they require very few external components to use.
The PICAXE 08M is a Microchip PIC12F683 which comes preloaded with a simple tokenized basic interpreter The PICAXE family as a nice, easy to use integrated development environment which is available free of charge for download here.
All that was left was to write the code, download it to the PICAXE, and solder it together. Happy Building !!!
The construction is simple providing you have the secret ingredient which is a length of RGB lighting strip based on the HL1606 LED controller from Wuxi Asic's Corp in China. I got mine while on a business trip in Shanghai. These light strips are becoming popular for signage and architectural lighting around the world. I have attached a picture of the 5 Meter strand I bought along with it's controller box. While they aren't common in this country (yet), there are several suppliers in the orient who will ship you some of this magic stuff. Check out these suppliers. Supplier 1 , supplier 2. There will be many more soon, no doubt ! (Note: watch this space.. I think I may be buying some of these stripes from China soon. I'd be happy to get some for folks if there's interest)
These light strips consist of a flexible copper tape with very (!) bright surface mount RGB LED's spaced at every inch. Each pair of LED's is controlled by an HL 1606. The strips are sold in many lengths each composed of shorter lengths which contain 20 LED's with 10 driver chips. My headband is made of one of those 20 LED segments.
The real trick to making this work was reverse engineering the HL 1606. This chip is a mystery.. with no English language documentation, and only very marginal documentation in Chinese.Using a scope, a demo driver I purchased, and rough translation of the documentation I was able to reverse engineer the signaling required to drive the strips.
The input signaling uses a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI ) bus which uses one data pin (D_I) .. and a clock pin (C_I) to shift in the control bits to load the color info to the strip. A Latch signal (L_I) is used to latch the data for one HL 1606 and pass it's old data to the chip on it's right. There is also a pulse width modulation (PWM) control pin (S_I) which controls color brightness and fades. Note this project does not use these fade features due to code size restrictions.. but they are very cool to explore.
Once I figured it out, it was pretty straightforward to program a micro controller to drive the strips. I used a PICAXE 08-M . I chose the PICAXE because a) I had them laying around :-) and b) they require very few external components to use.
The PICAXE 08M is a Microchip PIC12F683 which comes preloaded with a simple tokenized basic interpreter The PICAXE family as a nice, easy to use integrated development environment which is available free of charge for download here.
All that was left was to write the code, download it to the PICAXE, and solder it together. Happy Building !!!
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Signing UpStep 1Cut the light strip to length
The strips are sold in many lengths each composed of shorter lengths which contain 20 LED's with 10 driver chips. My headband is made of one of those 20 LED segments.
To cut your own headband, find one of the soldered connections attaching the fist set of 20 LEDS to the next section. Carefully cut at the soldered connection with sharp scisors. Use a fine tip, low heat soldering iron to clean off and re-tin the solder connections to the strip segment you just cut.
To cut your own headband, find one of the soldered connections attaching the fist set of 20 LEDS to the next section. Carefully cut at the soldered connection with sharp scisors. Use a fine tip, low heat soldering iron to clean off and re-tin the solder connections to the strip segment you just cut.
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Very Cool!
I have made a video on our led flexible strip light, you are welcome to check the bellow links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93yxkXm8sLs
If you want to get some further information, please contact me by trustrobin@gmail.com
I am Robin from Shenzhen China, we are ShenZhen HuiHongXing Optoelectronic CO.,LTD
-jc
On the EBay seller there are so many options. Is this same thing in a 1 meter version? http://cgi.ebay.com/5050-RGB-FLASH-SMD-LED-Strip-Multicolor-Light-100CM-12V_W0QQitemZ250458781519QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a5081b74f&_trksid=p4634.c0.m14.l1262&_trkparms=%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A30
Thanks for this neat project...
I have the same..!!!
Please definitely keep us up to date on any new sources for these things - it looks like I'm going to have to try and buy some off some fellow instructablers who have imported more than they need..hopefully they'll still have some when I get my other components all in and am ready to really start!
Thank you so much for sharing!
I just bough two 50cm LED RGB (20 LEDs total) strips based on the HL1606 ASIC from the link below. They cost $21.63 + shipping from Australia. Shipping was fairly priced and it seemed to be a good chance to play with these and not spend a bazillion dollars.
http://www.bliptronics.com/item.aspx?ItemID=83.
www.microcontrollersandmore.com
Shipping outside of australia can be quite pricey, sadly its the world we live in. :-)
It was great meeting you today at Union. Your DIY instincts are inspiring to aspiring engineers like myself, and to the students who watched your talks. Thanks for spreading your love of innovation.
(By the way, I don't know how we missed featuring this Instructable!)
used this code on my 40x1 picaxe, need a slight code mod though,
just wonderd if you could send the code for the pwm on SI pin as have no idea how to do it
thanks
andy
craskie06@hotmail.com
www.peaktopeakled.com/p-cl-dgtf51920-32t3.html
-jc
Let me check on the 11. setting. I believe it is used when ramping the brightness with he PWM. You might find the Arduino code that Xander H. wrote based on our quick collaboration. He's actually figured out the PWM http://code.google.com/p/ledstrip/
As far as how fast you can load them.. not sure.. but I think it'll be faster than you need :-) What are you trying to do ?
-jc
A rotating POV display has to be able to fully update N times per revolution, N=256 being popular. 40 LEDs at 300RPM means I need to be able to push 40*256*5=51200 bytes per second (just over 400kHz on the SPI clock), minimum, ignoring overhead. Is the maximum SPI speed for the HL1606 known?
Scrolling text is similar, using longer LED strips but slower framerate.
Xander is delaying 2000us (2ms) as part of each write, so his maximum output speed is 500 LED updates per second, too slow by a factor of 20. I expect that most of this delay is not necessary, and I would be doing SPI at a lower level than the arduino's digitalwrite, so I could speed it up significantly, but enough?
Also, Xander's code doesn't quite agree with yours, you are using "10" for bright LEDs where he has "10" as "fade up". Can you clarify that?
It might just be my misunderstainding of Arduino delays, perhaps the built-in writes do take some time. Or maybe it's just not able to clock fast enough. I do have a "real" (official) controller for the LEDstrip that runs through some built-in patterns, including "jumpy" ones that seem to push the data 10 LEDs at at time, instantly. But it tends to do it only for different colors on a fully-lit rope, so I suspect that the faint remnants of the old color getting pushed is hidden by the new, full-bright colors getting pushed in.
Anyway, I bought 20m of this cable and don't need it all, so if anyone needs some I could sell off small pieces. At $40 shipping @ 10m minimum from China, you'll find that buying small lengths is difficult - but mine's already in the US so if you have a project you want to build, let me know here!