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Hello World on the HL1606 LED Light Band

by Carlyn Maw on July 30, 2009, one comment

So this inaugural post goes out with a big hello to John Cohn and our Burning Man tribe working on the Ferris Wheel Art Car, as well as to Alan Eyzaguirre for introducing me to this great site here at Posterous. Finally, more time on content, less on CSS & AJAX!
 
So the wheels of this fabulous car are going to be lined with LEDs as the plan currently goes. John is the main guy when it comes to this and he gave me some of the material we are going to use so I could get started on thinking about what patterns we could program.
 
He won an award for it!
 
http://www.instructables.com/id/Too-cool-Rainbow-Headband/
 
So my steps, illustrated below:
 
1. Set up for soldering – I had the aluminum flashing for the back of the mini-breadboard I was going to use later and taped it to the strip to stabilize the very flexible backing and to serve as a heat sink to protect the plastic.
 
2. I soldered
 
3. Checking for continuity – All good except there seems to be contuity between the latch pin (blue) and the and the power (5v) I don’t see any solder connecting them and since I don’t actually have the datasheet I’m going to wait until it causes problems…
 
4. Loaded in test Arduino code from Xander Hudson based on John PIC code. It includes a C Library and an Arduino sketch
  http://code.google.com/p/ledstrip/
  http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Libraries
  http://hackaday.com/2009/06/17/addressable-rgb-led-strip/
  http://www.synopticlabs.com/blog/?p=97#more-97

 
5. Complied, loaded and ran!
 
Tomorrow I will play with the code more and see if I can get it to do what I want! You might notice that the 13th LED is always out. I think that has to do with how Xander’s code is written and not with the LED itself being out.
 
Now lets see how Posterous/Thunderbird/Gmail handles all these files at once… I’m holding my breath… And I was denied. Probably by gmail… Trying again with smaller jpg files…

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