The wide range of DC42's effects.
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I've been helping some artists improve their LED control for "Breathing trees" here in Massachusetts by replacing a string of individually-controlled RGBW LEDs with a simple string of 12 Volt LEDs and a variable-voltage, Arduino-controlled power supply.
It's working wonderfully and I built them nine controller boards that plug into Arduinos and they are able to change the Arduino code, upload and design breathing patterns by themselves which is an awesome thing for the artists to be able to do.
They are documenting everything and hoping to teach other artists how to control very dim LEDs without flickering for outdoor/dark use, so I'm sketching a schematic and documenting things.
I dug around to credit the people who did the original work I copied and guess what????
The original circuit I used as inspiration was from the good old @dc42 !!!
So, thanks Dave, your ideas spread far and wide and hopefully will be all the rage in artist/maker spaces in the future.
I'll add a link in the schematic to your posting so people can reference the original design.
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@alankilian
I've heard rumors, that RRF3.5 will have better NeoPixel support. Maybe the artists will learn gcode soon?
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@o_lampe They started with something like a Neopixel, but all those PWM-based LED strings have a problem when you are trying to make them very very dim.
Turning an LED on 100% power for 1% of the time to try and make a dim string results in flickering that's detectable by the human eye and also doesn't give a dim output.
That's why I changed the design to use the variable-voltage DC:DC converter to power regular LED strings. You can reduce the voltage to juuuuuuuust above the forward voltage of the diodes and get a nice dim continuous light that works perfectly in the dark.
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@alankilian said in The wide range of DC42's effects.:
That's why I changed the design to use the variable-voltage DC:DC converter to power regular LED strings. You can reduce the voltage to juuuuuuuust above the forward voltage of the diodes and get a nice dim continuous light that works perfectly in the dark.
It would be better to control the current, not the voltage, because the brightness would then be less dependent on temperature. You can configure the LM2596 to work in constant current mode too, if you can avoid commoning the LED grounds.
