RGB LED WS2812 5050

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Introduction

In this tutorial you will learn how to use the RGB LED WS2812 5050 with the Arduino UNO board.
This LED Stick is a small chainable board with eight 5050 WS2812 RGB LEDs. The WS2812s are each addressable as the driver chip is located inside the LED. Each LED Stick has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and requires 5V.

What you will need - Hardware

For this tutorial you will need:

The Circuit

The connections are pretty easy, see the image above with breadboard circuit schematic.

The code

// NeoPixel Ring simple sketch (c) 2013 Shae Erisson
// released under the GPLv3 license to match the rest of the AdaFruit NeoPixel library

#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>
#ifdef __AVR__
#include <avr/power.h>
#endif

// Which pin on the Arduino is connected to the NeoPixels?
// On a Trinket or Gemma we suggest changing this to 1
#define PIN            2

// How many NeoPixels are attached to the Arduino?
#define NUMPIXELS      8

// When we setup the NeoPixel library, we tell it how many pixels, and which pin to use to send signals.
// Note that for older NeoPixel strips you might need to change the third parameter--see the strandtest
// example for more information on possible values.
Adafruit_NeoPixel pixels = Adafruit_NeoPixel(NUMPIXELS, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);

int delayval = 500; // delay for half a second

void setup() {
  // This is for Trinket 5V 16MHz, you can remove these three lines if you are not using a Trinket
#if defined (__AVR_ATtiny85__)
  if (F_CPU == 16000000) clock_prescale_set(clock_div_1);
#endif
  // End of trinket special code

  pixels.begin(); // This initializes the NeoPixel library.
}

void loop() {

  // For a set of NeoPixels the first NeoPixel is 0, second is 1, all the way up to the count of pixels minus one.

  for(int i=0;i<NUMPIXELS;i++){

    // pixels.Color takes RGB values, from 0,0,0 up to 255,255,255
    pixels.setPixelColor(i, pixels.Color(0,100,0)); // Moderately bright green color.

    pixels.show(); // This sends the updated pixel color to the hardware.

    delay(delayval); // Delay for a period of time (in milliseconds).

  }
}

Download the code from here and open it with Arduino IDE. Inside you will also find and the library.

neopixel_ws2812_5050.zip
File Size:	41 kb
File Type:	zip

Download File

Well done!

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