Asked
— Edited
I can not longer use the BlinkM for Alan's eyes as they have modified the hardware and voltage requirements etc. so I'm looking for other options. The neopixels blaster would be perfect but looks like it's not on the production line yet.
...I'm really only looking at trying to get ez Builder to control a single neopixels color cycle, fade, brightness, control on and off. I'd like to be able to use sliders like the blink M control (rgb ). Any ideas or other options I'm overlooking?
....sorry i wasn't clear...i meant if i choose the neopixel route and use the code your wrote.
Either myself or CochranRobotics can help with the neopixels. I was thinking that my code for the neopixel ring could be modified to function with the dotstar light strips using the same commands as it uses for neopixels.
That would be cool. I looked into the links you sent and would be nice to do away with an inbetween board and be able to go straight to the EZB.
The issue with using the EZ-B to drive a dostar string directly might be speed. I don’t know how many dotstar leds you could drive with a reasonable amount of speed. You would need to use two pins to control the dotstar leds. One pin would be the clock pin. The other pin is the data pin. To start a transaction with the dotstars you need to set the data pin low then pulse the clock pin from low to high and back to low 32 times. This is the start frame. The next comes what the documentation calls an LED frames. One frame for each led in the string. Once all of the dotstar led have each received a frame an ending frame needs to be sent. This means setting the data pin to high and pulsing the clock pin from low to high and back to low 32 times. Have to look up the data pattern for the LED frames but each LED frame is 32 bits. So send 32 bits for each LED frame. From what I gather there are some variation in dotstar LEDs. They do not all you the same color order. The first 8 bits of the LED frames address a global register that affects all three colors. The next 24 bits may vary but it is 8 bits for each color. The color order varies. For example some are RED, GREEN, BLUE; Some are BLUE, GREEN, RED, etc. So it will take some tinkering to figure out what the color pattern is. Lots of bit bashing as it called to make it work. But definitely doable. For each of the 32 bits in an LED frame the clock pin must be pulsed from high to low then back to high.
I wish I knew how to make plugins. Seems to me that a plug-in could do most of the work.
Yes I agree a plug in would be great.
In the mean time I’m back to the neopixels. I’m going to load up the code from tutorials page onto a Adafruit Gemma (ardurino mini) I have and test to see if I can do what I want ( color fade, almost like a 2 color rainbow) with sliders.
The Adafruit Gemma is not the same as arduino mini. There is actual a product called the arduino mini.
The Adafruit Gemma does not have a standard serial port available. The fix is to use the arduino "SoftwareSerial Library". Be sure to assign the Serial Port pin in the code with the SoftwareSerial Library on the original Gemma.
The Adafruit Gemma M0 does have standard serial ports available. Not sure how the serial interface works on the Gemma M0. I don't have one. There should be documentation on it somewhere on the Adafruit site.
I have not tinkered with the arduino mini serial port setup so I can't give you any hints on it. should be documentation on using serial ports with it as well.
Just be sure you modify the pins correctly in the code for what you need.
Glad i didnt get to it today. I had not looked closer at the Gemma. I just ordered the Pro Trinket. Its about as big as i can go in the space I have. Seems full featured, has the same ATmega as the uno. But you are limited to about 28k in code size.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/2000