Lincomatics DIY Blog electronics, 3d printing, hacking, etc. INTRODUCTIONIve been laying the groundwork for doing some projects using remote controlled RGB LEDs. My first attempt was Lampduino, which used discrete RGB LEDs, and an ITEAD Colorduino as a controller. In that project, I ran into several pitfalls though inexpensive, assembly of the LED matrix was very labor intensivethe LEDs were rather dim, due to the limited drive capability of the Colorduinothe frame rate was slow, due to limited baud rate and RAMwhile it was scalable, I didnt like the idea of having to use a separate Colorduino for every 6. LEDs. A few years have passed, and WS2. B LEDs have dropped enough in price enough to get into the range that I feel is affordable. They can be found on e. HighSpeed USB Serial Adapter optimized for Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7. Easy Setup and Online Support. Fast Shipping and Low Prices. Hercules SETUP utility is useful serial port terminal RS485 or RS232 terminal, UDPIP terminal and TCPIP Client Server terminal. It was created for HW group. CPosUndTMC/TMC2.jpg' alt='Virtual Serial Port Wifi Speed' title='Virtual Serial Port Wifi Speed' />HW VSP3 Virtual Serial Port HW VSP is a software driver that adds a virtual serial port e. COM5 to the operating system and redirects the data from this port. Cypress WiFi Bluetooth combos integrate IEEE 802. WLAN Bluetooth in a singlechip solution for smallformfactor IoT designs. Link to TPLink WDR4300 Router at Amazonhttp Link to KEDSUM CP2102 Module STC Serial Converter At Amazon httpamzn. Pmd8. Bay and Ali. Express very cheaply. Also, they can be controlled without any specialized hardware all that is needed is one GPIO pin. There are libraries available for many of the popular microcontrollers. Some examples are Arduino, ESP8. Virtual Serial Port Wifi Speed' title='Virtual Serial Port Wifi Speed' />Teensy 3. Raspberry Pi. HOST SOFTWAREThe other piece of the puzzle is control software. For Lampduino, I hacked u. Ra. NGa. Ta. NGs mt. Xcontrol Processing sketch into rgb. Mtx, but I found Processing to be a very limiting platform, which was hard to debug. This time around, I found a couple of interesting free LED control programs, which are both quite powerful. The first one is Jinx LED Matrix Control, which runs on Windows only, and the second is Glediator, which is a Java app. Both programs, while free, are not open source. However, they are both powerful enough to do some interesting things. HARDWAREI decided to start my experiments with an Arduino Pro Mini clone, because they have a tiny footprint, are cheap clones are lt 2 shipped from China on e. Bay, and I happened to have some laying around. Also, the Arduino Pro Minis ATmega 3. P MCU runs at 5. V, so no level shifting is required when interfacing to WS2. Bs. Glediators creator, Solderlab, has barebones, fast serial client Arduino sketch which can be downloaded at WS2. Glediator Interface. It can run on any 8 bit ATmega based Arduino such as the Mega, UNO, Deumilanove, etc. The code that outputs the data to the LEDs is written in assembly language, and is thus, very fast compact. Also, rather than using Arduinos Serial library, it contains its own very compact serial code. At the expense of a little bit of speed, I decided to generalize it a bit, and add my own packet protocol. My code is on github at WS2. Remote. The main changes that I made in my version of the code are Since I didnt understand the Glediator examples serial code, I reverted to using Arduinos built in Serial library. Ive tested it with baud rates up to 1. FTDI cable on a Windows PC, and it works fine. I added support for my own packet protocol. Glediators serial protocol is extremely simple. Each frame starts with 0x. My simple packet protocol adds an XOR check byte, as well as a few simple commands such as color fill and blanking of the LEDs. I also wrote a C program, called pkttest, which demonstrates usage of my packet protocol. Hookup of the WS2. B LED strand to the Arduino is quite simple. You can use any 8 bit Arduino. Autocad Lisp Steel Sections Handbook. First, you must select a data pin to drive the strand. I arbitrarily decided to use pin PD2. For speed and compactness, instead of using Arduino functions to access the data pin, the code refers to the ATmega port and pin numbers, rather than Arduinos rather arbitrary digital pin numbers. On the Arduino Pro Mini, digital pin 2 PD2, as can be seen from the following pin mapping diagram FIRMWARE CONFIGURATIONSo WS2. Remote. h is configured as follows define DATAPORT PORTDdefine DATADDR DDRDdefine DATAPIN 2. Next, PIXELCNT needs to be set to the number of LEDs in your strand. I tested with an Adafruit Neo. Battlefield 4 Crack Fix Windows 8. Pixel ring containing 1. LEDs define PIXELCNT   1. Connect your the data input pin of the first LED of your WS2. B strand to your selected data pin. How To Install A Mac Os On Vmware Esxi. Adafruit recommends a 3. The Neo. Pixel ring I used already has a resistor onboard, so I didnt need it. I connected the 5. V and GND pins directly to the corresponding pins on the Arduino. To protect against current inrush when powering it up, Adafruit also recommends connecting a 1. V and GND pins. However, its not necessary if youre just going to power it from USB, which is what I did, since I was only powering 1. LEDs. For large strands, you will need an external power supply to supply sufficient current, as each LED can draw up to 6. A at full brightness. If using an external power supply, make sure to always apply power to the WS2. B strand before the data pinHOST SOFTWARE CONFIGURATIONI used the same FTDI cable that I used for programming the Arduino as a virtual com port for sending data to it. When configuring JinxGlediator, select Glediator protocol. For speed, the sketch just receives raw pixel data, and dumps it out to the LED strand, so the data format is in native GRB order. When configuring JinxGlediator, select Glediator as the device type Jinx or output mode Glediator. Make sure that the baud rate of the corresponding com port matches BAUDRATE as defined in your sketch. I tested 1. 15. 20. FTDI cable, and both worked fine with both programs. It failed at 1. 25. If you want to play around with my packet protocol, the pkttest code is self explanatory. I tested it with Visual Studio 2. Windows 8. 1, and g in Debian linux 8. Prior to compilation, set COMMPORT to correspond to your Arduinos serial port. Also, confirm that BAUDRATE in. WS2. Remote. h matches the value that was used when loading the Arduino sketch. To compile and run pkttest in linux, use g pkttest. WIRELESS CONTROLMy first inclination for wireless control was to use Bluetooth, due to its simplicity. The Bluetooth SPP Serial Port Profile makes it easy to construct a wireless virtual serial interface between a host computer and the Arduino. This allows you to use exactly the same host software configuration that you would for a direct serial connection to the host. I had an Elechouse EHB Serial Bluetooth Module in my parts bin very similar to the ubiquitous HC 0. I decided to try it out. Before using the EHB module can be used, it must be configured with a series of simple AT commands. I hooked it up to my Windows PC with my FTDI cable, and used Pu. TTY as a serial terminal to configure it. Connecting the EHB module to the Arduino is quite straightforward Arduino EHB5v VCCGND GNDRXD TXDTXD RXDPairing the EHB to a host computer creates a virtual serial port for the host software to access. Unfortunately, I was using Windows 8. Bluetooth SPP clients is rather flaky. Every time I powered down the LED controller, I had to unpairpair the Bluetooth in order to get the virtual serial port to work properly. While it worked flawlessly when the virtual serial port was functional, ultimately, I abandoned Bluetooth due to the flakiness of Windows Bluetooth SPP support. Perhaps Linux can handle it better. Next WS2. 81. 2B LED Neo. Pixel Control Part 2 Wi. Fi Control via ARTnet on ESP8.