hey hey everybody. ive been cooking up a LED hulahoop in my head for a while now and i really want to get the ball rolling on it. I'm looking to have (at the bare minimum) about 32 RGB LEDS that can pulse and strobe and fade independently. I've looked into multiplexing and I2C and at this point i'm not really sure what the best method would be to achieve this (or if the arduino is even the right chip for the job).
here's a really advanced hoop:
I'm not trying to get THAT complicated (yet) but i would love to make one thats similar in its awesomeness.
Let me know what your brilliant minds think of this
Thanks
Abraxas
One possibility would be 6 TLC5940 LED controller chips, or something similar that has lots of independent PWM outputs and some sort of serial or I2C input.
In principle, yes. You need to have good earth connections and a good decoupling capacitor between each TLC5940 ground pin and the anodes of the LEDs it is driving. See Arduino Playground - TLC5940 for how to connect TLC5940s to Arduino.
Bear in mind that the total supply current required from +5v will be up to about 1A if you run the LEDs at 10mA, or 2A if you run them at 20mA, so you'll need a suitable power supply and external regulator. At 20mA the TLC5940s will get quite warm, so consider using heatsinks. The RGB LEDs need to be common anode.