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[Reply #15 on:]

Ok, I'll track down Greg's forum name, I just got a board from him in the mail, it's pretty heft with all the screw terminals.
Says it drives the segments with 9 LEDs on a strip nice & bright from 12V!

[Reply #16 on:]

Greg is goodman1887
Here's the first board he assembled, and a clip of a test sketch of the LED strips lighting up.


http://www.crossroadsfencing.com/BobuinoRev17/led_strip_test.MOV

[Reply #17 on:]

Nice, for my application i have a atmega328 with only A3-5 left and i need it to communicate with something else that can toggle 14 outputs(28 leds) -- 1 output can toggle 2 leds since they are 14 R/G leds.

Sounds perfect for a i2c i/o expander.
That only needs a4 and a5 and you can easily control 16 i/o pins.
Have a look at a MPC23016 for 16 i/o pins or MPC23008 for 8 i/o pins.

Each i/o pin can be either input or output.

If you really want to have some fun and speed is not a critical issue,
you could actually do it all with one pin using a shift register.
Have a look at this article for how.
It uses a pair of RC networks to drive a 74HC595 shift register.
Pretty cool actually:
http://www.romanblack.com/shift1.htm

--- bill

[Reply #18 on:]

If you want to connect 28 LEDs to an Arduino, you'd be much better off multiplexing them. The attached diagram shows 2 x 3 multiplexing, which you could expand to 4 x 7. C1 - C2 and R1 - R3 are Arduino pins (you'll need 11 pins for 28 LEDs). Choose the value of resistor R to get the peak current you want in each LED (20 to 25mA is probably about right).

The diagram on the right shows how I was suggesting to connect 2 LEDs to one pin. However, if they are red LEDs, then a single 1n4148 in series may not be enough.

[sorry, can't post the pics because of "uploader full" messages]

Here is the schematic, shrunken so that the forum accepts it.