Lazy saturday pixel rope LED Arduino hacking

Singapore video diary part 7: Spent a saturday noodling with a "programmable" LED rope type I found in Sim Lim tower and purchased for a planned art bike project in the coming summer:

It is an IP67 weather sealed type with 6 buffered PWM LED driver ICs every meter, each supporting 6 PWM channels (2 x RGB "pixels",) for an effective "pixel density" of 12 per meter. Each "pixel" is a group of 3 very bright 5050 RGB LEDs, so the rope has 36 LEDs per meter and draws about the same amount of power as the passive types I've used in the past, and is just as flexible.

Hooking it up to Arduino and controlling the rope is pretty simple - GND,12V and a 4-wire daisy-chained shift register type interface with data, clock and latch plus a special "sync" line for timing of the rather primitive fade effects possible.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Arduino
• sim lim tower
• led
• HL1606
• singapore
• PWM
• illutron

[ymdeardorff1]

Now if only someone could make on of these work with an external 110 volt controller. Having each effect controllable by a single 110 volts source, would be perfect, rather than using the built in controller.

[frumperino]

@ymdeardorff1 - hi, what do you mean 110 volt controller? This one uses a plain old Arduino. I write my own code for the effects. I could hook the effect triggers up to a 110 volt signal but I'm not sure what benefit that would be. I prefer to use low volt DC for everything except feeder power supplies.

[frumperino]

I haven't got around to putting up a project page but it seems a good idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

The rope is a fairly well known type using the HL1606 driver chip and if you google for it there is plenty documentation. The chip has many limitations and unfortunately you can't directly set a specific RGB level for each pixel. It is a bit like HAM mode on the old Amigas except not as clever.

I'll clean up the code and share it for those interested.

[ckeyes8888]

Nice work. Might there be some docs posted

somewhere?

[FataleXception0F]

This is awesome! Can you give us more details? Do you have a project page? code? how do you address the driver ICs, i2c? and where can I buy some? thanks :)