Addressable RGB LED project

Interesting idea. A few things come to mind. The 5v output of the Arduino will not have enough power to drive the LED strip. If you check the Adafruit site you will see they call that out in the product details and also the tutorial.

As far as the software on the PC to send info to the Arduino there is no need to write it in C. You could use the free version of Visual Studio to write something in C# that will talk to the Arduino via the serial port. That is how I did the code for the tweeting heart episode

You could also write it in Python if you wanted

I imagine there are examples of how to do what you want to do floating around the net. If you did some googling I wouldn't be surprised if you found something very close to what your trying to make.

Wold I be able to power the Arduino through a USB port and talk to it, this is what Ben seems to do in his Tweeting Heart episode?

I could run the lights off of a separate power supply.

Also my motherboard doesn't have a serial port, is there an alternative for this?

My motherboard is an MSI X79A-GD45 Plus.

You can power the Arduino off the USB port and also talk to it.

You don't need a motherboard with a serial port. I should have made that clear. When you plug the Arduino into the USB port the drivers make it appear as a serial port. This allows you to use standard serial libraries to talk to the Arduino. That is how I wrote the code for the tweeting heart episode. I wrote a C# program that used built in serial libraries to talk to the Arduino.

Thanks for the help! I'll post some pictures when I have it finished.

How is going on with the project? Waiting for the exciting pictures,

I like the LPD8806 RGB strips very much, order them from a Chinese factory, who always developing kinds of digital RGB Leds,

now they have new developed a 60 LED/M LPD8806 RGB Strip

If you need independently-controllable LED RGB values, you can always use an I2C connection from an Arduino to something like the BlinkM (pricey) or "ghetto" version of the BlinkM you can build from AtTiny chips for a few bucks each (Ghetto Pixels - Building an open source BlinkM). I use those and a Raspberry Pi to illuminate the display of grid-computing projects aligned with individual CPU cores (small program reads the BOINC project settings for the World Computing Grid and contacts the RasPi website to aggregate CPUs across multiple distributed systems). Pretty simple setup and build for the pixels and config using I2C is a quick solution.

Kirk

thanks let me to talk about Rgb addressable led & Arduino,

Arduino is module language basic on C.It is easy user just need to

call module.recently I am trying to get the apa102 led strip http://www.ledlightmake.com/rgb-addressable-led-strip-c-80_87/apa102-led-pixel-strip144pcs-apa1025050-ledm-with-144pixels-p-308.html timer to generate a (The diagram"apa102 Protocolhttp://www.ledlightmake.com/ledlightmake_serv/apa102%20datasheet%28Parameter&Data%20format%29.pdf") squarewave using the output with Arduino.

That wasn't so bad!!