My 3rd big Halloween Project - an actual nightmare

28 Oct 2015

A little background... here are my first two Halloween projects:

Now my third one... In this project I want to control a ton of LEDs and output sound. Sound I have covered, from the Scary Porch project. However, the LEDs are the nightmare.

I am currently using shift registers to address all the LEDs in the group, working on controlling 100 LEDs right now. A shift register take 1 output and turns it into 8. It's working, but this seems like a brute force way to attack the issue.

Here is a test:

It is not going as seemless as I wanted. Does anyone here have some suggestions on how to control hundreds of LEDs?

Top Comments

gadget.iom over 10 years ago in reply to Robert Peter Oakes

NeoPixel (WS2812) would be my suggestion too.
Really simplifies the wiring. Plus you'd get full colour/intensity control.
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Catwell over 10 years ago in reply to balearicdynamics

Thanks... Neopixels can't do the job. Especially since I need the LEDs to be far apart.

C
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Robert Peter Oakes over 10 years ago in reply to Catwell

well the MCP23S17 chips will give you 16 I/O per chip and I beleive you can daisy chain them

I assume your planning on making a small board then, the wiring will be quite involved otherwise (Time consuming)
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balearicdynamics over 10 years ago in reply to Catwell

Di Cabe,

despite that with shift registers you can control obviously any individual led, it depends by the byte mask you write in the chained shift registers array, this is a solution while as mentioned the alternative is neopixel. Most of this depends on what is your budget (but I prepend to neopixel anyway IMHO).

I have NOT told you that the example is for Arduino, I told that this board was initially designed for Arduino (Pi was not on the market) but as it is a simple shift registers chain, it works perfectly also with the Rasperry PI. Ignore Arduino that for your project means just making simple things more complex (and less efficient).

Enrico
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Catwell over 10 years ago in reply to balearicdynamics

Enrico,

I want to avoid Arduino. The Pi2 should be able to handle it on its own.

For my project, I need to individually control each LED and the LEDs will be spaced apart quite a bit.

Peter,

I just need to turn each LED individually. Which is why I was thinking of using shift registers.

C
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