addressable led controller idea doable?

Projects General Guidance
1

Short story: unfinished engineer student, just picked back up macro controllers for a project, rekindled my flame. I just spent a good deal of time reading amtels ATmega32u4 data sheets, learning a small bit of amtel studio and integrating LUFA with it.All this to debug a project that would not work, come to find out the latch time of ws2812b changed that's was what was wrong. It was coded using spi, the way the timings was set the whole code word have had to been redone from the ground up. I learned Soo much of low level coding tho :slight_smile:

So I got a new idea not sure if it's workable, I don't want to hit a wall.

  1. I got an app that spend the led info our over TCP or UDP.
  2. I write an app that that grabs the info from the local host, process it what ever, then sends it to the Leonardo over usb serial?
    3 the Leonardo is load with 1 of 2 programs made with Adafruit NeoPixel limiting by ram, or with this GitHub - bigjosh/SimpleNeoPixelDemo: A demonstration showing how easy it can be to drive WS2812 NeoPixels

I would have to drop In some code that gets the data from the usb, then sends it out, but if I recall right this needs to be uninterrupted stream of data to the led.

Is there a to read from the pc and send to led at same time? It's been a long while and I don't recall so much of what I learned and the limits of this little guys.

Thanks for your time

2

The basic idea sounds like the lighting standard of DMX but using USB instead of RS484/ART-NET.

3

The data for one LED strip has to reside in the controller memory. After a change the entire strip information has to be shifted out into the LEDs. This is a one time operation and afterwards the controller is free to accept updates. Eventually add an ACK message to your protocol, telling the sender that the controller is ready for new data.

4

Thanks, I did end up getting that spi timing fixed, using delays after LUFA reads the data in and before it gets sent back out. So it should with the TCP /UDP method, then this controller would work with out all the craziness of device spoofing using custom dynamic link libraries and would not be hinder to the low number of brightness levels the device it was spoofing could do. It could use all 256 levels!!!

Time to get grinding. I'm fired up and ready to go. This project has really got me back in to gear.

FYI it's for diy arcade controls. Looking to help the community that has helped me by getting a lower cost up-to-date controller for addressable leds, they can build with easy.

Thanks everyone.