Making A Simple Addressable Array From LED Strips

led_array_from_led_strips

[Patrick] was prepping for some future projects he had in mind, for which he will need a simple 2D array of addressable LEDs. While it is certainly possible for him to build his own LED array and control hardware, he thought he would try out some off the shelf products to see if something might fit his needs.

He picked up a strip of addressable RGB LEDs from Adafruit, and while they worked very well, they were a bit too pricey for the amount of LEDs he knew he would need. He picked up a strip of similar LEDs without PWM capabilities built-in, and gave those a spin – they worked well enough, so he got to work building his LED array.

While LED strips might not jump right out as the best way to make an LED array, they can be easily cut and rearranged without any issue, provided you solder in a couple of wires to connect the disjointed strips. [Patrick] did just that, and wrote a small Arduino library that allows for easy control of the grid.

We’re not sure if he plans on scaling these arrays any larger than 8×8, but we are definitely interested to see what he has in store for them.

Check out a quick video of his LED array in action below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU8kQ_tv0C4&w=470]

9 thoughts on “Making A Simple Addressable Array From LED Strips

  1. With those addressable strips it does. There is uc’s on the strip, 1 for each 2-LED segment (notice the little black uc’s in there). If those chips aren’t set up for PWM you can’t PWM the LEDs. Trust me, I have some of these strips and I use them all the time.

      1. Yeah, you can hack up some PWM using interrupts (see link in comment above). takes extra CPU, though. I (blog author) didn’t include that in this library, cause the projects I have in mind don’t need it, but would love to see a pull request with that functionality :)

  2. I would love to have some animated lights for Christmas lights but they are simply too expensive. I hope someone can figure out a way to have fun with non-addressable LED strips. They are truely inexpensive.

    I don’t mean to make them addressable. But maybe modified into shorter addressable strips. Or some how make it appears as dimmable.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.