2011-11-23, 16:01
Damn, this WS2901 implementation is really nice! I've been looking at 6 to 8 small strips of LED behind my TV but as it's 50 inch having just 2 sections of color on either side is going to look really weird. Having more would mean I would need to many PWM outputs. I could do this with TLC5940 IC's but they are rather complicated to drive and would involve a crapload of wiring, transistors, resistors and other stuff that I don't want.
This looks slightly more expensive as I would need 2 strips to have a nice coverage, but in the end it might even be cheaper because of (the lack of) failing experiments and broken components. Also, with the straints running on 5V common cathode, the risk of frying the Arduino is much lower compared to a 12V supply which could jump on the Arduino and bake the chip.
I wonder though if an ATMega 328 can run all of those (50 in my case) LEDs. They are 24 bits, times 50 is 1200 bits which you would need to shift out every time. You'd need at least 24 Hz to run nicely with HD (1080p24) material which means 1200 * 24 = 28.800 bps serial output. I don't know if this is at all possible. After all, you need to push and latch all those bits with a timer on each change.
This looks slightly more expensive as I would need 2 strips to have a nice coverage, but in the end it might even be cheaper because of (the lack of) failing experiments and broken components. Also, with the straints running on 5V common cathode, the risk of frying the Arduino is much lower compared to a 12V supply which could jump on the Arduino and bake the chip.
I wonder though if an ATMega 328 can run all of those (50 in my case) LEDs. They are 24 bits, times 50 is 1200 bits which you would need to shift out every time. You'd need at least 24 Hz to run nicely with HD (1080p24) material which means 1200 * 24 = 28.800 bps serial output. I don't know if this is at all possible. After all, you need to push and latch all those bits with a timer on each change.
