8 x RGB LED Array

Hello All, i am looking at using 8 off RGB LED's as a shift light module in motorsport,

I am able to Recieve a CAN based message 5 Bits Long, i.e, ( 00, 00, 00, 00, 00, 00 )

The first bit, will controll the arrangement of the LEDS to illuminate, starting with the LSB being LED 1 and a binary addition to add further LED's in sequence,

Can anyone suggest a simple method of arraying 8 RGB led's and mapping an active sequence from 00 ( all off ) to 128 ( all on )

The brigtness of each colour will be controlled from the next 3 bits,

many thanks, and i will post results in the future,

Rich

Use Common Anode RGB LEDs.
Connect the anodes to +5
Connect the 24 cathodes to 2 TLC5490 drivers.
Under software control you can then control brightness of each R, G, B, and fade up/down as needed.

Alternately, use 8 WS2801, one per LED.

Do you really need RGB LED's I would think a mixture of single colour Green, Yellow & Red would do.

8 LEDs takes up less space than 24 individual LEDs.

The array needs to be multifunctional, for multicolour warnings, oil pressure, fuel pressure etc,

I had a thought of using common cathode led,s, connecting all reds to a own output for brightness, same for green and blue,

Then connecting each cathode to a digital output to pull low to activate each led as required,

Only a single colour or mix of colours in each led is required at a time,

From there, I need to find a way of turning a 0-255 value received over CAN into the various combinations of led pattern?

Sound sensible?

Comments please guys,
Appreciate all help

Gonna need anodes in there somewhere:

I had a thought of using common cathode led,s, connecting all reds to a own output for brightness, same for green and blue,

Then connecting each cathode to a digital output to pull low to activate each led as required,

Draw up a schematic & post it here.
Can't help on the CAN to display until you post what the CAN codes are and what you want them to do re: red/yellow/green for each status light.

Here is a quick schematic of what i am proposing, the high and low side drive will need to be through power transistors,
attached.

As for the CAN code,

On Bit 1 of the CAN message i will recieve a value of between 00 and FF in HEX, being 0 to 255 in decimal as the Arduino recieves it from the CAN controller, or in binary 1111 1111

Each 1 represents an LED,
The binary addition of light values will reslt in one of the 255 possible LED patterns available with 8 LED,s

The LED's will be arranged in a straight line, and i am hoping that the LSB will correspond to the LED on the right hand end of the chain,

The main reason for this, is so that it will be a direct replacement for another existing product.

The can message will be as follows,

Base ID, 023, Data Length ,5, (00, 00, 00, 00, 00,)

Pattern Bit RED Brightness Green Brightness Blue Brightness Enable, (always FF)

The RED, GREEN and BLUE, brightness channel will be simply read from the CAN message, and written to the Arduino PWM channels appropriately for different colours.

Hope this helps,

What do you think?

Visio-RGB Led Schematic.pdf (21.6 KB)

Add a current limit resistor on each PWM output. No need for PNP transistor.
If you needed 3 greens on at one time as an example, you'd have to multiplex the cathodes so that only 1 PWM output & 1 cathode is selected at a time. Not hard to do.

Your "pattern bit" will be one of B00000001, B00000010, B00000100, B00001000, B00010000, B00100000, B0100000, or B1000000?
Or more than 1 LED will be sent at a time?
Seems pretty workable either way.
How fast do messages come in?

Why would I to need to multiplex the cathodes? As if I wanted 3 greens on for example, I could simply activate the corresponding pins,

Yes that is exactly how the "pattern bit" should work,
So I have to find a way of relieving the pattern bit and turning that into the corresponding output.

Thanks so far

So i have the hardware built,

I have the code written to take the CAN id and write it out to the PWM pins for Red, Green and Blue Brightness,

Now i need to figure how to get the 0-255 value i get on the first bit of the can message, to control the 8 LED pins in binary order, a bit like a counter,

I had been using byte[x] as the command for the PWM pins, i,e, analogWrite(3byte[3]0;

So it would be byte[1] for the pattern,

How do i do a simple binary output to the 8 led pins corresponding to the value in the CAN message?

Hope you can help guys

Write a little loop that masks off each bit one by one and writes the value to the pin driving the correspoding LED.

Thats fine, but all of the pattern data is on Byte 1 only,

What i am struggling with, is the the command to pass the 0 to 255 value from the CAN message to the 8 digital outputs to turn the corresponding LED's on

I was assuming there is some clever command that passes an 8 bit integer to 8 defined output pins,

I am probably hoping a bit too much there i guess?

RIch

"I was assuming there is some clever command that passes an 8 bit integer to 8 defined output pins, "

If you had all 8 output on the same Port, you could use
PORTD = newCanByte;
for example using PORTD pins.
With an Uno, only PortD has 8 pins and if you are using Serial than 0,1 are committed.

So put your pins in an array

pinsArray[] = {2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9;}  // could be whatever group you select

and loop thru them to write each one

maskBit = 1; // start with B00000001
for (x=0; x<8; x=x+1){
if ((CANbyte & maskBit) >0){           // makes all bits but 1 low: 0000000C, next pass 000000C0, etc
digitalWrite (pinsArray[x],  HIGH);
}
else {
digitalWrite (pinsArray[x], LOW);
}
maskBit = maskBit<1;  // next bit - B00000010, B00000100, B00001000, etc up to B10000000
} // next x

OK, thanks crossroads for all the help, when i am at work tomorrow, i will try setting that code up, i am fairly new to programming, and i have seen a few examples of sending a binary number to 8 led's, but they all seem to step through a sequence as a counter rather than pulling the value required from a data stream,

I really appreciate all of your help and will give it a go tomorrow and let you all know the results,

I plan on developing this into a product, as the hardware side of things is simple for me,

I will post all my results , schematics, and CAn templates here once i have something better to report than simple questions,

Thanks again

Rich

Im stuggling a little bit with the maskbit , as i am unsure of the purpose this is serving,

The number i want to send to the array is in decimal, and i want the array to conver it to a binary representation,

is the byte command used for this?

thanks

Rich

You are sending decimal, while it will be manipulated as binary.

The maskBit makes sure that only 1 bit at a time is being tested for the digitalWrite.

Say you send in 64.
64 in binary = 01000000
so 64 & B00000001 = 0
64 & B00000010 = 0
64 & B00000100 = 0
64 & B00001000 = 0
64 & B00010000 = 0
64 & B00100000 = 0
64 & B01000000 = >0 so turn on an LED
64 & B10000000 = 0

You can prove this to yourself using serial.print to print out the results.

I tried running your code,

i had to move a few colons and add a few braces to get it to compile, but i dont seem to get any output,

Just for now i have replaced the CANbyte with a decimal number , i assume this should not be an issue,

code posted below

int x = 0;
int pinsArray[] = {2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}; // could be whatever group you select
int maskBit = 1;
void setup()
{
pinMode(pinsArray[8],OUTPUT);
}
void loop ()
{

maskBit = 1; // start with B00000001

for (x=0; x<8; x=x+1){

if ((126 & maskBit) >0){ // makes all bits but 1 low: 0000000C, next pass 000000C0, etc

digitalWrite (pinsArray[x], HIGH);
}

else {

digitalWrite (pinsArray[x], LOW);
}
}

maskBit = maskBit<1; // next bit - B00000010, B00000100, B00001000, etc up to B10000000
} // next x

OK, so i have managed to get the code to start running, and modifying the decimal number where the CANbyte value was will give me the desired LED patter,

The isue being, that is only flashes up for a second and it doesnt seem to be running through the loops correctly,

I have had a look over it and i cant spot anything obvious,

I had to add a "<" to the Maskbit line at the bottom as i assume it was supposed to be a Bitshift command? is thios correct?

Appreciating all the help folks

RIch

int x = 0;
int pinsArray[] = {2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9};  // could be whatever group you select
int maskBit = 1;
int i = 0;


void setup()

{
  for(i=0; i<8; i++)
pinMode(pinsArray[i],OUTPUT);
pinMode(10,OUTPUT);


maskBit == 1; 

}

void loop ()
{
digitalWrite(10,HIGH);
                                   // start with B00000001

for (x=0; x<8; x=x+1){
  
if ((255 & maskBit) >0){                 // makes all bits but 1 low: 0000000C, next pass 000000C0, etc

digitalWrite (pinsArray[x],  HIGH);
}

else {
  
digitalWrite (pinsArray[x], LOW);
}

}

maskBit = maskBit<<1;   // next bit - B00000010, B00000100, B00001000, etc up to B10000000

}// next x

I still cannot grasp exactly what your trying to do with the value you get but if your trying to turn on/off the LED's in the binary pattern corresponding to the value receive then you can also do it this way

const byte target = B11110001;

void setup(){
    Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop(){
    for (byte x=0;x<8;x++){
        if (((target>>x) & 1)==1){
            Serial.print("1");
        }
        else {
            Serial.print("0");
        }
    }
             Serial.println();

    for (byte x=0;x<8;x++){
        if (((target<<x) & 128)==128){
            Serial.print("1");
        }
        else {
            Serial.print("0");
        }
    }
    while(true){
    }
}

I have included 2x versions that rotate the bits out to either the left or the right.