Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

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jastanton
 
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Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by jastanton »

Hey so I may have bitten off more than I can chew but I wanted to hook up 413 individually addressed RGB LEDs and came here to see the best way to do that. http://goo.gl/EZdkYh is the project I'm working on (originally off of reddit). I don't want to spend days wiring and soldering and I would ideally like to spend less than a dollar per LED, these may be mutually exclusive goals but I came here to see if it was possible :)

Stats: The holes are on a 1"x1" grid, the hole sized range from 1/8" to 1/2, I would ideally like to use Raspberry PI, and I don't have much experience at all, but that's not a big deal for me, if you point me in the direction of resource I'll learn whatever it takes to get this done :)

jastanton
 
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Re: Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by jastanton »

Found a nice post about this: viewtopic.php?f=8&p=65581

If I went with something like this: http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/produc ... /75-peggy2 it looks like I would spend $250 for 640 RGBW leds and I would have to do the soldering myself but it It doesn't look like I have to worry about PWM's or resistors or anything, it would just work... I'm assuming I can wire this up and not mount them on the bread board, just use longer cables... and lots of them? Would that work?

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by Franklin97355 »

OK, just off the top of my head. Neopixels would reduce the amount of wiring but they do not work directly from the RasPi due to timing issues. An Arduino between the pixels and the pi is probably the best way to go. You will need a large power supply for that many pixels but Adafruit has those. If you could supply a bit more detail on what you envision this as being it would help in the advice we can give.

jastanton
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2014 11:14 am

Re: Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by jastanton »

Oh sure, So if you follow my goo.gl short link to imgur you will see that I have a 3'x4' board with 413 holes varying in size that make up a map of the world. I want to put an LED behind every hole and write a few programs to play with my map wirelessly (i.e. receiving commands from a local network over wifi), I am a software engineer who has spent 0 time working with Hardware and I couldn't have picked a larger project so start off with :P.

I wanted to make a few programs like battleship, display time of day, heat maps, game of risk etc... the programming is the easy part (especially if I can program with the raspberry pi ;) ). The wiring looks to be the expensive and time consuming part.

The Peggy 2 ( http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/produc ... /75-peggy2 ) looks like it could take some pain away If I understand it correctly it looks like they give me all I need to hook everything together and they take care of the things I don't understand (resistors & power supplies, multiplexing(?), PWMs etc...).

I don't want to spend $400 on just LEDs if I don't have to, but i don't want to have a completely blank slate either because I'm going to end up getting burnt out trying to figure it out. Thoughts?

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by Franklin97355 »

The Peggy is not RGB just a single color. If you usr RGB leds you will need to run 4 wires to each location and control them individually

jastanton
 
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Re: Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by jastanton »

Looks pretty colorful to me!
Image
the RGBW LED's are $131 extra.

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: Wood Map Of The World; 400+ LEDs

Post by Franklin97355 »

You're right I didn't scroll far enough down the description.

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