I was wondering if anybody here knew where to find some RGB LEDs that are brighter than typical 5mm LEDs. Basically, what I'm looking for are individual LEDs that can provide the kind of brightness that you can get from a 12V LED strip. I'd like to have control over individual LEDs, but the 5mm LEDs that I've seen aren't as bright as I'd like them to be.
My backup plan is to simply cut the LED strip into the smallest, 3 light segments, and control each of those individually, but my preference would be to find some individual lights.
Your requirements are very wishy washy - brightness has units of Candelas, or in the case of LED micro Candelas. The brightness of any LED is to be found on the data sheet. So look it up.
A lot of distributes have selection guides like this one:- RGB LED selection from Farnell
5mm leds or 5050 leds or 5050 leds on a strip or just anything bright?
Individual adressable yes or no?
How many leds do you plan to use?
What are you trying to do?
In general: What gives you more light than one led are many leds of the same kind.
There are also high power RGB leds available.
Again, what do you want to do? Would one bright rgb led serve you, too?
Sorry if my question wasn't specific enough. I'm still pretty new to this so I don't always know what the terms are or what kind of information I should be providing to help answer my question.
So here's the project. I want to make hallway lighting running along the walls at the floor. I guess you would consider it accent lighting since the overhead light is still the primary light. But I tried testing some 5mm through hole LEDs (I don't know their candelas) and they just didn't have the intensity that I was looking for. I also want something that is individually addressable, because I would like to incorporate some fading and chasing features which ruled out the LED strips I had purchased. Prior to this, I didn't realize you could buy LED strips with individually addressable lights.
Just reading your responses has given me enough information to do some better research on my own. The WS2801 seems to be a pretty popular choice. In total, I probably need about 5-6 meters of total length. Would this be a good LED strip to buy or does anybody have any other suggestions. Besides that, what else am I going to need to control the LEDs from my arduino?
As a microcontroller I'd recommend a Teensy 3.1, which is fully Arduino compatible, less expensive, and vastly more powerful. For the relatively low number of LEDs for your project, even at 144 LED/meter that processing power is not really needed, but the smaller and cheaper should work for anyone.
However, that's just the hardware side. Helmuth has already mentioned to make sure to pick an Arduino with enough RAM to handle the frame buffer and the Teensy 3.1 has more than enough.
Another often forgotten item is actual libraries that provide a higher level API for you be able to talk to the LEDs without having to mess with LED signal timing etc. On the Teensy there are two alternatives. FastLED2 And OctoWS2811. FastLED also works for other Arduino boards. OctoWS2811 only works on the Teensy 3.x boards as it takes advantage of the fast DMA engine of the Teensy boards.
We are testing v3.1 already. (FastLED supports the OctoWS2811 now. Benchmarks showed, that FastLED is producing less processor load than the Octo lib. FastLED supports up to 16 parallel data lines, Octo just 8.)
I completely agree that the Teensy 3.1 is the better (and cheaper) hardware for those jobs. I just didn´t dare to say that in the Arduino Forum. The most WS2812B arround need a levershifter like the 74HTC245. WS2801 and WS2811 tend to work fine with the 3.3V data signal.
Thanks for the help guys. This should be plenty to at least get me started. Once I get a hold of all the hardware, I'm sure I'll have some questions with the programming, but we'll get there later. Thanks again!
I don't the think there is anything wrong with mentioning the Teensy boards on the Arduino forum.
The creator of these boards, Paul Stoffregen over the years has provided very many of the impovements to the Arduino environment.