I have two 1m 60 LED WS2811 strips, and expect to receive several more in coming weeks from Chinese suppliers. Once I have seven of them, I plan to use them as a scrolling message sign.
However, with two 1m strips (120 LEDs total), you can spiral them loosely (not tight enough to break the strip) and end up with six rows… Sorta. And, with a quick Arduino sketch (making use of some TVout fonts)… You can create a mini-circular scrolling message sign.
Here is “HELLO WORLD”:
Just for fun…
Code please!!!
See http://www.github.com/allenhuffman
BTW, the GitHub code has been updated a week or so after I first posted it to fix some bugs.
Hi Allen! I’m using Arduino 1.6.5 and is showing this: Fatal error: fontALL.h: No such file or directory
You have a fixed code? Thank you
Do you have the TVout library installed? I just used their fonts until I have time to make my own.
To add color, we’d want to do something simple like this:
1) In LEDSign.ino, create an array of all the colors you want to cycle through:
// Array of colors:
const uint32_t colorTable[] =
{
strip.Color(255, 0 , 0 ); // Red
strip.Color(0 , 255, 0 ); // Green
strip.Color(0 , 0 , 255); // Blue
strip.Color(255, 255, 255); // White
}
2) Inside the main loop where it processes the letters, pick out a color to use for the setPixel(). I’d use a variable to track which color slot we are using and one to store it (so we don’t have to look it up every time we use it)…
// Inside the “if (msgLen>0)” place with the other variables:
uint8_t whichColor;
uint32_t colorTemp;
// Just before “for (letter=0; letter sizeof(colorTable)) whichColor = 0;
//. Then, where it does the setPixel(), I’d make it use the “colorTemp
variable instead of the hard-coded color:
// 1 = set a pixel.
strip.setPixelColor((row*LEDSPERROW)+colOffset,
colorTemp);
That should get you a row of letters, with each letter being a different color based on the color table.
(My code for color is untested; I don’t have my LEDs with me, but I can check this week if you need help.)