Good afternoon,
I am looking for some feedback on types of Leds to use for a light table. Anyone have any experience with some cheap and programmable RGB Led's? The ones from shiftbrite look awesome but seem a little spendy. I also have a question that goes along with having a light table. How do you power them all? I don't get how you can run all of those LEDS with the arduino and get enough power to them. Anyone with some thoughts?
Thanks for any help.
how big of a table are you looking to build?
for a large table the easiest way (hardware wise) would be use 12V LED RGB Digital Point Modules Round (they use the 6803 shift register) then just connect the Black to 12v (-) and Red to 12v (+) then the rest to the Arduino (Green = Data, Yellow = CLK, White = Ground) and the rest is just software
the other option for a large table is using something like the SPI (TTL) Decoder 32x RGB Ch (96x Total Channels) and wiring a led module in each square and connecting it to one of the ports
if it is a small table you could get a led martix kit (if you can still find one that doesn't use surface mount chips) de-solder them then run the wires to each square and solder them on to the wires
either way you won't want to use the arduino to power them as it can't handle the current draw
You have to think of the cost of the whole project vs the cost of the individual LEDS. If you save $50 on LEDs then spend $200 trying to drive them and tons of time making it work, you're out more than you want. The shiftbrites are $5 a pop but include the shift registers and there are solid projects out there for them. Controlling large numbers of rgb LEDs can be tough.