RGB Pixel LED Tester

A while back @TomKeddie did the FadeCandy (SMD Build Night - fadecandy $15 plus fees Feb 25 7pm @VHS) project… I decided I wanted to make a largish pixel display and figured 8 runs of 60 would be enough. I will arrange them as 16 rows of 30 which nicely fits on a 2’ x 4’ board.

I ordered some 30 LED 1 Meter AliExpress WS2812 strips from here (I actually got them in 2 weeks):

I found this Adafruit article pretty helpful on large displays:

A good idea before gluing the pixel strips down is to test them, so I built a small stand alone Arduino Pro Micro based board to do just that. It is loosely based on the code in the above article. To connect the pixels I used both a terminal strip (to connect a few of the connectors used on my pixels) and a 3 pin header (to connect 3 leads with alligator strips to test pixels without connectors). I used a 5 volt power supply I had. The code just runs a basic test but I’d like to have some jumper selectable options for speed (400kHz vs 800kHz) and LED count (30, 60, etc).

My plan is to use the FadeCandy with a RPi3 to drive the pixels and allow remote connectivity via WiFi to send the data… That’s the theory anyways… I have painted up a piece of MDF and will stick on the LED strips once it has had some time to dry. I figure to cover with a piece of translucent coroplast.

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