Arduino Nano to control 12V WS2812B LED Strip

Projects Programming
1

Hi I am fairly new to arduino and electronics.

I am trying to control a LED strip (WS2812B) 5V with a Arduino Nano board. The LED strip is about 3m. Each RGB LED draws approximately 50 mA when it is set to full brightness and powered at 5 V. I have about 90 LEDs.

My question is how do connect the power supple of the 5V LED and how to control it with a 5V arduino nano board?

Also would the current be enough through a DC battery?

Thank you in advance!!

2

Here is one of nearly 200,000 pages found with a search for "arduino nano ws2812".

3

OMG Thank you so much!!!

4

4.5A at full bright, will need a pretty big battery. I bet full bright is closer to 60mA as well.
Nano just needs single data line to the strips.
Connect Nano 5V and the strip 5V to the power supply.
Same for the Gnds, connect both to the power supply.

5

The LED strip needs a separate connection to the power supply. It can't be powered through the Arduino because it takes too much current.

90 LEDs x 50mA is 4.5 Amps so your power supply/voltage regulator needs to be rated for 4.5A or more.

There are no 5V batteries so you'd need a voltage regulator/DC/DC converter. It'll have to be a "big battery" and it won't be easy to find a DC-DC converter that can handle the current.

Note that a battery's amp-hour rating allows the for discharge down to about 60%, so if you had a 6V, 4500mAh battery, you'd be down to about 3.5V after an hour and you wouldn't get the full-calculated life out of it. (But, that's assuming worst case with all LEDs at full-brightness, white.)

6

I've used "power bank" type batteries for this sort of thing - you can get ones that offer multiple 2.1A-rated outputs, and use multiples if needed (you might think you'd need protection against back-powering - but in reality, you don't - the outputs are generated by boost converters which can only pull the voltage up - as long as they're all on, I've never had issues with this).

Battery life can be crappy if you're running them all on max brightness white - but I was favorably impressed by the battery l ife when running most animations. My halloween outfit (trenchcoat lined with rainbow faux-fur, wizard hat, no shirt, and 100 WS2811 LEDs wrapped around mybody under the coat) lasted all night (9pmish to 5am) on only one ~10000mAh power bank!)