RE: Creating the FLORAbrella Circuit

zengirl2 — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 17:29:04 GMT

Hey, Shabaz,

Thanks for your answer and diagram. Your explanation helped to make it clearer, and in the meantime, I also posted on Adafruit's forum. It looks like I will be going with something similar to my Fritz file to allow for the rainbow pattern. I know Adafruit said that I would have to create an "Object 2" in the programming. Once I get the strips and use their library, this will become clearer. The good part is that I won't have to run the power and ground strip up and down like in my pic. It seems like I can consolidate them at the top. That is going to help the edge of my umbrella a lot. Thanks again and I will continue to post updates. I hope to order some of my parts today. [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-dceb1393-63fd-495b-8cd5-23e56362f439/contentimage_5F00_930.png:16:16]

RE: Creating the FLORAbrella Circuit

shabaz — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 03:55:30 GMT

Hi Leslie,

It looks like you have the right plan, i.e. chaining DI and DO so that you can extend it, and connecting the DI to any general purpose output pin on the microcontroller board, and splitting it into a couple of banks so that you program the correct colors at twice the speed since the two banks can occur in parallel.

Each strip contains lots of DI and DOs (i.e. per light) connected together in series anyway, so essentially you're just extending it beyond the strip onto the next strip.

The fanning method can be fine too (depends on your requirements, and how many to fan).

Fanning multiple from a single output pin on the microcontroller board would result in the same color scheme on all the strips, which is ok if this is what you want. The frequency that you can control them would have a limit, because of the amout of capacitance that the single pin output on the microcontroller would see (the microcontroller will not be able to toggle the DI pin ultra-rapidly when there is too much capacitance), but running several (maybe all 8) should be possible, if you have a slow refresh speed (of the order of a few kHz would most likely be fine). It's hard to be sure without knowing how much capacitance there is, including the wiring. You could try out your test code and see, with wire of the length that you are expecting to use. If you can't run all 8, then you could fan (say) 4 to a pin, i.e. use a total of two pins.

Putting them in series like in your diagram would allow the strips to have totally different colors so that may be more flexible if this is what you want (e.g. some rotating effects for example).